Twin buildings and groups of Kac-Moody type

Abstract

The combinatorial objects called buildings were first introduced (cf.) to provide a geometric approach to complex simple Lie groups – in particular the exceptional ones – and later on, more generally, to isotropic algebraic simple groups (cf. eg.). The buildings which do arise in that way are spherical, that is, have finite Weyl groups. This assertion has a partial converse, proved in: roughly speaking, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the (isomorphism classes of) buildings of irreducible spherical type and rank r ≥ 3 and the algebraic absolutely simple groups of relative rank r, where the notion of algebraic simple groups must be suitably extended so as to include, for instance, classical groups over division rings of infinite dimension over their centre. In order to have a similar statement in the rank 2 case, one must impose an extra condition, the Moufang condition, on the buildings under consideration.