On geometric SDPS-sets of elliptic dual polar spaces (Q965230)

The author uses so-called SDPS-sets to obtain information about the natural embedding of the near polygon associated to a quadric of Witt index \(n\) in \(2n+1\)-dimensional projective space over a field \(\mathbb{K}\) into the half spin geometry \(HS\) related to the quadric of Witt index \(n+1\) over a suitable quadratic extension \(\mathbb{K}'\) of \(\mathbb{K}\). A \textit{near polygon} is a point-line incidence geometry such that two points determine at most one line, and for each point \(p\) and line \(L\), there is a unique point on \(L\) nearest to \(p\) in the point collinearity graph. The standard examples are the geometries arising from polar spaces by taking as point set the maximal singular subspaces, and lines the next-to-maximal subspaces, with incidence reverse containment, and these are called \textit{dual polar spaces}. In the paper under review, the author considers a field \(\mathbb{K}\) admitting a quadratic Galois extension \(\mathbb{K}'\), and a quadric \(Q^-(2n+1,\mathbb{K})\) of Witt index \(n\) in the projective space PG\((2n+1,\mathbb{K})\) which, after tensoring up with \(\mathbb{K}'\), gets Witt index \(n+1\). The corresponding hyperbolic quadric is denoted \(Q^+(2n+1,\mathbb{K}')\). Using a generator \(\alpha\) of the latter which is disjoint from its conjugate, the author constructs in an entire geometric fashion an SDPS-set of the dual polar space \(DQ^-(2n+1,\mathbb{K})\) defined by \(Q^-(2n+1,\mathbb{K})\). Recall that an SDPS-set of a dual polar space \(\Delta\) of rank \(2\ell\) is a set of pairwise noncollinear points inducing ovoids in all quads containing at least two points of the set, and carrying the structure of a dual polar space \(\Delta'\) of rank \(\ell\) when these ovoids are considered as lines. There are two more defining properties: (1) the distances between points in \(\Delta'\) are exactly half of the distances in \(\Delta\), and (2) every line of \(\Delta\) incident with a point of \(\Delta'\) is contained in a quad of \(\Delta\) containing at least two points of \(\Delta'\). The points of \(\Delta\) not at maximal distance of an SDPS-set form a geometric hyperplane, and the author proves that the geometric hyperplanes arising this way from his SDPS-sets are induced by hyperplanes of the projective space PG\((2^n-1,\mathbb{K}')\) in the spin embedding of \(DQ^-(2n+1,\mathbb{K})\). The author now also proves the following nice result: let \(DQ^-(2n+1,\mathbb{K})\) be embedded in the half spin geometry \(HS\) mentioned before and let \(x\) be a point of \(HS\) (this plays the role of the generator \(\alpha\) above). Then there is a SDPS-set \(X\) in a convex subspace of \(DQ^-(2n+1,\mathbb{K})\), say of diameter \(K\), such that the distance in \(HS\) from \(x\) to any point \(y\) of \(DQ^-(2n+1,\mathbb{K})\) is equal to the largest integer contained in \(K+1+d(X,y)\), where \(d(X,y)\) denoted the distance in \(DQ^-(2n+1,\mathbb{K})\) from \(X\) to \(y\).