Boundedness properties of automorphism groups of forms of flag varieties

Abstract

We call a flag variety admissible if its automorphism group is the projective general linear group. (This holds in most cases.) Let $K$ be a field of characteristic $0$, containing all roots of unity. Let the $K$-variety $X$ be a form of an admissible flag variety. We prove that $X$ is either ruled, or the automorphism group of $X$ is bounded, meaning that, there exists a constant $C\in\mathbb{N}$ such that if $G$ is a finite subgroup of $Aut_K(X)$, then the cardinality of $G$ is smaller than $C$.