Chimney retractions in affine buildings encode orbits in affine flag varieties (Q6060084)

Jacques Tits introduced buildings as a unifying framework for studying algebraic groups over arbitrary fields. In Tits' original construction of spherical buildings, a building is a simplicial complex associated to and acted upon by a semisimple algebraic group. Bruhat and Tits later constructed affine buildings, for algebraic groups over local fields. Many features of these spherical and affine buildings correspond to delicate algebraic structures in the associated group. However, as established by Tits and others, not all buildings arise from a group. In the paper under review, the authors use the rich geometry and combinatorics of arbitrary affine buildings to capture the relationships between retractions (mappings of the entire building onto a single apartment) and minimal galleries (shortest paths between alcoves in a given apartment). They then use these relationships to give unified proofs of purely group-theoretic statements concerning flag varieties in all situations where there is an associated affine building.