Ideal triangles in Euclidean buildings and branching to Levi subgroups

Abstract

We introduce the notion of ideal triangle in the Bruhat-Tits building associated to a split group -- it is analogous to the usual notion of triangle, but one vertex is "at infinity" in a certain direction. We prove that the algebraic variety of based ideal triangles with prescribed side-lengths is naturally isomorphic to a suitable variety of genuine triangles. From theorems pertaining to genuine triangles, we deduce saturation theorems related to branching to Levi subgroups and to the constant term homomorphisms.