Closures of locally divergent orbits of maximal tori and values of homogeneous forms

Abstract

Let ${\mathbf {G}}$ be a semisimple algebraic group over a number field K, $\mathcal {S}$ a finite set of places of K, $K_{\mathcal {S}}$ the direct product of the completions $K_{v}, v \in \mathcal {S}$ , and ${\mathcal O}$ the ring of $\mathcal {S}$ -integers of K. Let $G = {\mathbf {G}}(K_{\mathcal {S}})$ , $\Gamma = {\mathbf {G}}({\mathcal O})$ and $\pi :G \rightarrow G/\Gamma $ the quotient map. We describe the closures of the locally divergent orbits ${T\pi (g)}$ where T is a maximal $K_{\mathcal {S}}$ -split torus in G. If $\# S = 2$ then the closure $ \overline{T\pi (g)}$ is a finite union of T-orbits stratified in terms of parabolic subgroups of ${\mathbf {G}} \times {\mathbf {G}}$ and, consequently, $\overline{T\pi (g)}$ is homogeneous (i.e. $\overline{T\pi (g)}= H\pi (g)$ for a subgroup H of G) if and only if ${T\pi (g)}$ is closed. On the other hand, if $\# \mathcal {S}> 2$ and K is not a $\mathrm {CM}$ -field then $\overline {T\pi (g)}$ is homogeneous for ${\mathbf {G}} = \mathbf {SL}_{n}$ and, generally, non-homogeneous but squeezed between closed orbits of two reductive subgroups of equal semisimple K-ranks for ${\mathbf {G}} \neq \mathbf {SL}_{n}$ . As an application, we prove that $\overline {f({\mathcal O}^{n})} = K_{\mathcal {S}}$ for the class of non-rational locally K-decomposable homogeneous forms $f \in K_{\mathcal {S}}[x_1, \ldots , x_{n}]$ .