Two exceptional 3-adic affine buildings (Q583375)

The authors construct in a very explicit way discrete chamber-transitive automorphism groups G of two affine buildings of type \(\tilde C_ 2\) related to orthogonal groups over the field \({\mathbb{Q}}_ 3\) of 3-adic numbers. In order to describe G as an arithmetic group, they use the construction of these buildings by classes of \({\mathbb{Z}}_ 3\)-lattices in resp. 6- and 5-dimensional vector space over \({\mathbb{Q}}_ 3\). They calculate the stabilizer in G of a vertex (for each G) and it is shown how all groups G are related. Then these groups G are used to produce finite chamber transitive GABs (a GAB is a building-like geometry) belonging to the diagram \(\tilde C_ 2\). This is achieved upon passage modulo ``level n congruence subgroups'' of G (normal subgroups consisting of matrices which are the identity matrix modulo n, \(n>1\) and n not divisible by 3). No similar results can be expected for many other affine buildings. For some 2-adic buildings, this was done by \textit{W. Kantor} [J. Algebra 92, 208-223 (1985; Zbl 0562.51006)].