The exceptional simple Lie group $F_{4(-20)}$, after J. Tits

Alain Valette

Published 2022-11-24Version 1

This is a semi-survey paper, where we start by advertising Tits' synthetic construction from \cite{Tits}, of the hyperbolic plane $H^2(Cay)$ over the Cayley numbers $Cay$, and of its automorphism group which is the exceptional simple Lie group $G=F_{4(-20)}$. Let $G=KAN$ be the Iwasawa decomposition. Our contributions are: a) Writing down explicitly the action of $N$ on $H^2(Cay)$ in Tits'model, facing the lack of associativity of $Cay$. b) If $MAN$ denotes the minimal parabolic subgroup of $G$, characterizing $M$ geometrically.