THE GEOMETRY OF BLUEPRINTS PART II: TITS–WEYL MODELS OF ALGEBRAIC GROUPS

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to a problem raised by Jacquet Tits in 1956: the Weyl group of a Chevalley group should find an interpretation as a group over what is nowadays called $\mathbb{F}_{1}$, the field with one element. Based on Part I of The geometry of blueprints, we introduce the class of Tits morphisms between blue schemes. The resulting Tits category$\text{Sch}_{{\mathcal{T}}}$ comes together with a base extension to (semiring) schemes and the so-called Weyl extension to sets. We prove for ${\mathcal{G}}$ in a wide class of Chevalley groups—which includes the special and general linear groups, symplectic and special orthogonal groups, and all types of adjoint groups—that a linear representation of ${\mathcal{G}}$ defines a model $G$ in $\text{Sch}_{{\mathcal{T}}}$ whose Weyl extension is the Weyl group $W$ of ${\mathcal{G}}$. We call such models Tits–Weyl models. The potential of Tits–Weyl models lies in (a) their intrinsic definition that is given by a linear representation; (b) the (yet to be formulated) unified approach towards thick and thin geometries; and (c) the extension of a Chevalley group to a functor on blueprints, which makes it, in particular, possible to consider Chevalley groups over semirings. This opens applications to idempotent analysis and tropical geometry.