Split orders and convex polytopes in buildings

As part of his work to develop an explicit trace formula for Hecke operators on congruence subgroups of SL2(Z), Hijikata (1974) [13] defines and characterizes the notion of a split order in M2(k), where k is a local field. In this paper, we generalize the notion of a split order to Mn(k) for n>2 and give a natural geometric characterization in terms of the affine building for SLn(k). In particular, we show that there is a one-to-one correspondence between split orders in Mn(k) and a collection of convex polytopes in apartments of the building such that the split order is the intersection of all the maximal orders representing the vertices in the polytope. This generalizes the geometric interpretation in the n=2 case in which split orders correspond to geodesics in the tree for SL2(k) with the split order given as the intersection of the endpoints of the geodesic.