Homotopy properties of the complex of frames of a unitary space

Abstract Let be a finite‐dimensional vector space equipped with a nondegenerate Hermitian form over a field . Let be the graph with vertex set the one‐dimensional nondegenerate subspaces of and adjacency relation given by orthogonality. We give a complete description of when is connected in terms of the dimension of and the size of the ground field . Furthermore, we prove that if , then the clique complex of is simply connected. For finite fields , we also compute the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix of . Then, by Garland's method, we conclude that for all , where is a field of characteristic 0, provided that . Under these assumptions, we deduce that the barycentric subdivision of deformation retracts to the order complex of the certain rank selection of that is Cohen–Macaulay over . Finally, we apply our results to the Quillen poset of elementary abelian ‐subgroups of a finite group and to the study of geometric properties of the poset of nondegenerate subspaces of and the poset of orthogonal decompositions of .