Highest weight modules and polarized embeddings of shadow spaces

摘要

The present paper was inspired by the work on polarized embeddings by Cardinali et al. (J. Algebr. Comb. 25(1):7–23, 2007) although some of our results in it date back to 1999. They study polarized embeddings of certain dual polar spaces, and identify the minimal polarized embeddings for several such geometries. We extend some of their results to arbitrary shadow spaces of spherical buildings, and make a connection to work of Burgoyne, Wong, Verma, and Humphreys on highest weight representations for Chevalley groups.