Closed orbits for the diagonal group and well-rounded lattices (Q515278)

A lattice in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) is called well-rounded if its non-zero vectors of shortest length span \(\mathbb{R}^n\). Let \(A\) be the subgroup of \(G = SL_n (\mathbb{R})\) of diagonal matrices with positive entries and let \(\mathcal{L}_n =G/SL_n (\mathbb{Z})\) be the set of unimodular lattices in \(\mathbb{R}^n\). The dynamics of the action of \(A\) on \(\mathcal{L}_n \) has been much studied because of its applications in number theory. The authors show that every closed \(A\)-orbit in \(\mathcal{L}_n \) contains a well-rounded lattice. McMullen had shown that every compact \(A\)-orbit in \(\mathcal{L}_n \) contains a well-rounded lattice, and the authors follow his strategy of proof. They use a result of Tomanov and the authors which classifies closed \(A\)-orbits. The other ingredient of the proof is an interesting covering result which generalizes both the Knaster-Kuratowski-Mazurkiewicz theorem and McMullen's result which was an essential part of his proof for the case of compact \(A\)-orbits. The question if every \(A\)-orbit contains a well-rounded lattice remains open. The authors show that it holds for almost every \(A\)-orbit, an application of Moore's ergodicity theorem.