Stable splittings associated with Chevalley groups. I (Q910761)

In Parts I and II [the second part is reviewed below (see Zbl 0696.55023)] the authors study stable splittings of the classifying space BE for the groups E which are extensions with kernel \({\mathbb{Z}}/2\) and quotient \(V=({\mathbb{Z}}/2)^ n\). The main result in Part I is that stably, for the case when \(n=2m\geq 4\) and E is the extra-special 2 group of real type, BE contains \(2^{m(m-1)}\) wedge summands, each equivalent to eBE where e is a certain Steinberg idempotent, and moreover \(eBE=M(m)\vee L(m)\vee eT(\Delta_{2m})\), where M(m) and L(m) are wedge summands of \(B({\mathbb{Z}}/2)^ m\), studied in earlier work of \textit{S. Mitchell} and \textit{S. Priddy} [Topology 22, 285-298 (1983; Zbl 0526.55010)], L(m) is the m-fold desuspension of the quotient \(Sp^{2m}S^ 0/Sp^{2^{m- 1}}S^ 0\) (where Sp denotes the symmetric product), and \(T(\Delta_{2m})\) is the Thom spectrum of the bundle \(B\Delta_{2m}\) over BE (where \(\Delta_{2m}\) is a certain irreducible representation of E). The method exploits an action of Out(E) on BE, and the fact that the group of outer automorphisms which are the identity on the center of E can be identified with the orthogonal group O(V,Q), consisting of the elements of GL(V,\({\mathbb{Z}}/2)\) that preserve a quadratic form Q on V associated with E. The commutator subgroups of O(V,Q) is a Chevalley group, hence has a BN pair and an associated Steinberg idempotent e. For the case considered in Part I, this Chevalley group is untwisted. Starting from a result of \textit{D. Quillen} [Math. Ann. 194, 197-212 (1971; Zbl 0225.55015)] which describes the algebraic structure of the \({\mathbb{Z}}/2\) cohomology \(H^*BE\), the authors calculate e and \(H^*eBE\), and use these to prove the stable splitting result. They also give a complete stable 2-local decomposition for BE in the case E has order 32 and the Arf invariant of Q is 0.