Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2011
In the paper ‘Bruhat–Tits theory from Berkovich's point of view. I. Realizations and compactifications of buildings’, we investigated various realizations of the Bruhat–Tits building of a connected and reductive linear algebraic group G over a non-Archimedean field k in the framework of Berkovich's non-Archimedean analytic geometry. We studied in detail the compactifications of the building which naturally arise from this point of view. In the present paper, we give a representation theoretic flavour to these compactifications, following Satake's original constructions for Riemannian symmetric spaces.
We first prove that Berkovich compactifications of a building coincide with the compactifications, previously introduced by the third named author and obtained by a gluing procedure. Then we show how to recover them from an absolutely irreducible linear representation of G by embedding in the building of the general linear group of the representation space, compactified in a suitable way. Existence of such an embedding is a special case of Landvogt's general results on functoriality of buildings, but we also give another natural construction of an equivariant embedding, which relies decisively on Berkovich geometry.