Locally Symmetric Spaces Seminar

I will give a brief introduction to spherical varieties. With a view towards understanding the geometry of the moment map, I'll talk about the local structure theorem for spherical varieties. More concretely, if X is a spherical G-variety and B a Borel subgroup of G, the theorem roughly states that the open B-orbit has a very pleasant geometric structure generalizing the open Bruhat cell in the case of GxG acting on X = G.