Borel subgroups of the automorphism group of an affine variety

Abstract

We study Borel subgroups of the automorphism group of an affine variety X and their associated Lie algebras. We prove a bijective correspondence between the set of Borel subgroups of Aut(X) and the set of maximal nested unipotent subgroups of Aut(X). We show that if X is factorial of dimension at most 3, then the Lie algebra of every maximal nested unipotent subgroup has the special property of being what we call"integral"; we also show that this fails for X = affine space of dimension>3. As an application of our results, we show that Nagata's automorphism is contained in a unique Borel subgroup.