Adjacency preserving maps between exterior powers of vector spaces (Q6154414)

Consider the exterior power \(\bigwedge^{r}U\) of a vector space \(U\). This exterior power is a vector space \(P\) over the same field and is spanned by terms of the form \(u_{1}\wedge u_{2}\wedge \cdots \wedge u_{r}\) (here \(u_{i}\in U \) for all \(i\)). The rank rank\((\mathcal{A})\) of \(\mathcal{A}\in P\) is defined to be the least number of terms required to express \(\mathcal{A}\) as a linear combination. The adjacency graph for \(P\) is the graph whose vertex set is \(P\) and where \(\mathcal{A}\) is adjacent to \(\mathcal{B}\) \(\iff \) rank\((\mathcal{A-B)}=1\). Let \(U\) and \(V\) be vector spaces over a pair \(\mathbb{F}\) and \(\mathbb{K}\) of isomorphic fields, respectively. In the present paper the authors answer the following question: which surjective maps \(\psi :\bigwedge^{r}U\rightarrow \bigwedge^{s}V\) preserve adjacency? They show that there are only two forms which \(\psi \) can take: (1) \(s=r\geq 2\) with \( \mathcal{\psi (A)}:\mathcal{=\psi (}0)+\lambda (\bigwedge^{r}T)(\mathcal{A})\) for all \(\mathcal{A}\in P\); (2) \(\dim U=n<\infty \), \(r\geq 2\), \( s:=n-r\geq 2\) with \(\mathcal{\psi (A)}:\mathcal{=\psi (}0)+\lambda (\bigwedge^{n-r}Q)\circ \mathcal{H}(\mathcal{A})\) for all \(\mathcal{A}\in P\). Here \(\lambda \in \mathbb{K}\) is nonzero; \(T:U\rightarrow V\) and \( Q:U^{\ast }\rightarrow V\) are semilinear isomorphisms with respect to a field isomorphism \(\sigma :\mathbb{F\rightarrow K}\); and \(\mathcal{H} :\bigwedge^{r}U\rightarrow \bigwedge^{n-r}U^{\ast }\) denotes the Hodge dual. The above result generalizes earlier work of \textit{M.-L. Liu} [Chinese Math. 8, 108--143 (1966; Zbl 0161.03301); translation from Acta Math. Sin. 16, 104--135 (1966)] and \textit{M.-H. Lim} and \textit{J. J. H. Tan} [Linear Algebra Appl. 430, No. 1, 564--573 (2009; Zbl 1161.15002)].