Extended \(F_4\)-buildings and the Baby Monster (Q5944895)

In this article, \(c\)-extensions \(\mathcal E\) of buildings of type \(F_4(t)\), \(t=1,2,4\), are studied under two combinatorial properties, which are essentially equivalent to the property that the collinearity graph of \(\mathcal E\) is locally the commuting graph of central involutions in the group \(F_4(t)\) (if \(t=1,4\)) and of one class of central involutions in \(F_4(2)\) (if \(t=2\)). The local structure of such geometries \(\mathcal E\) and their collinearity graphs is studied and several examples (all possessing a flag-transitive automorphism group) are constructed. The main result is that, for \(t=4\), there exists only one such geometry, which is flag-transitive with automorphism group the Baby Monster simple group. It should, however, be emphasized that the article is purely combinatorial in the sense that no group acting on \(\mathcal E\) is assumed to exist a priori.