Unipotent representations of Lie incidence geometries

Abstract

If a geometry $\Gamma$ is isomorphic to the residue of a point $A$ of a shadow geometry of a spherical building $\Delta$, a representation $\varepsilon_\Delta^A$ of $\Gamma$ can be given in the unipotent radical $U_{A^*}$ of the stabilizer in $\mathrm{Aut}(\Delta)$ of a flag $A^*$ of $\Delta$ opposite to $A$, every element of $\Gamma$ being mapped onto a suitable subgroup of $U_{A^*}$. We call such a representation a unipotent representation. We develope some theory for unipotent representations and we examine a number of interesting cases, where a projective embedding of a Lie incidence geometry $\Gamma$ can be obtained as a quotient of a suitable unipotent representation $\varepsilon_\Delta^A$ by factorizing over the derived subgroup of $U_{A^*}$, while $\varepsilon^A_\Delta$ itself is not a proper quotient of any other representation of $\Gamma$.