Automorphisms of non-spherical buildings have unbounded displacement

MaRDI QIDQ447754zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Peter Abramenko, Kenneth S. Brown

Publication date 5 September 2012

Published in Innovations in Incidence Geometry (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0710.1426

zbMATH Keywords

automorphismbuildingcenterdisplacement

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Groups with a (BN)-pair; buildings (20E42) Buildings and the geometry of diagrams (51E24)

Abstract: If f is a nontrivial automorphism of a thick building Delta of purely infinite type, we prove that there is no bound on the distance that f moves a chamber. This has the following group-theoretic consequence: If G is a group of automorphisms of Delta with bounded quotient, then the center of G is trivial.

Review text

Let \(X\) be a thick building, and \(\phi\) be a (not necessarily type-preserving) nontrivial automorphism of \(X\). If \(X\) is a Euclidean building, then it is easy to prove, by geometrical methods, that there is no bound to the distance that \(\phi\) moves a point. The goal of this paper is to generalize this result to any \(X\), as long as it does not have a spherical component. As a consequence, a cobounded group of automorphisms of \(X\) has trivial center.NEWLINENEWLINEAlthough the authors mention a possible geometric proof, they only use combinatorics of Coxeter groups and buildings. They also study the case of spherical buildings, in which the question has to be reformulated: one can ask if the displacement of \(\phi\) can be maximized, or in other words, if there exists a chamber \(C\) which is sent to an opposite chamber. There is a counterexample (by Hendrik Van Maldeghem) to this naive question. These kind of automorphisms were called later on domestic and studied in a subsequent series of papers (see for example [\textit{B. Temmermans} et al., Ann. Comb. 16, No. 4, 905--916 (2012; Zbl 1259.51004)]).

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Cited in

(15)

• Opposition diagrams for automorphisms of large spherical buildings
• Domesticity in generalized quadrangles
• Euler characteristics and Möbius algebras of \(p\)-subgroup categories.
• Opposition diagrams for automorphisms of small spherical buildings
• Characterizations of trialities of type \(\mathrm{I}_{\mathsf{id}}\) in buildings of type \(\mathsf{D}_4\)
• CHABAUTY LIMITS OF SIMPLE GROUPS ACTING ON TREES
• Collineations of polar spaces with restricted displacements
• Symplectic polarities of buildings of type \(\mathsf{E}_6\)
• Automorphisms and opposition in spherical buildings of exceptional type, I
• Automorphisms and opposition in spherical buildings of exceptional type. II: Moufang hexagons
• Automorphisms and opposition in spherical buildings of classical type
• Automorphisms and opposition in spherical buildings of exceptional type. III: Metasymplectic spaces
• Uniclass automorphisms of spherical buildings
• Automorphisms and opposition in spherical buildings of exceptional type. V: The \(\mathsf{E}_8\) case
• The combinatorics of automorphisms and opposition in generalised polygons

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