Affine Grassmannians for Triality Groups

Abstract

We study affine Grassmannians for ramified triality groups. These groups are of type ${}^3D_4$, so they are forms of the orthogonal or the spin groups in 8 variables. They can be given as automorphisms of certain twisted composition algebras obtained from the octonion algebra. Using these composition algebras, we give descriptions of the affine Grassmannians for these triality groups as functors classifying suitable lattices in a fixed space.