A uniform characterisation of the varieties of the second row of the Freudenthal–Tits magic square over arbitrary fields

Abstract

We characterise the projective varieties related to the second row of the Freudenthal–Tits magic square, for both the split and the non-split form, using a common, simple and short geometric axiom system. A special case of our result simultaneously captures the analogues over arbitrary fields of the Severi varieties (comprising the $27$-dimensional ${\mathrm{E}}_6$ module and some of its subvarieties), as well as the Veronese representations of projective planes over composition division algebras (most notably the Cayley plane). It is the culmination of almost four decades of work since the original 1984 result by Mazzocca and Melone who characterised the quadric Veronese variety over a finite field of odd order. The latter result is a finite counterpart to the characterisation of the complex quadric Veronese surface by Severi from 1901.