On the canonical embeddings of certain homogeneous spaces

We study equivariant affine embeddings of homogeneous spaces and their equivariant automorphisms. An example of a quasiaffine, but not affine, homogeneous space with finitely many equivariant automorphisms is presented. We prove the solvability of any connected group of equivariant automorphisms for an affine embedding with a fixed point and finitely many orbits. This is applied to studying the orbital decomposition for algebraic monoids and canonical embeddings of quasiaffine homogeneous spaces, i.e., those affine embeddings associated with the coordinate algebras of homogeneous spaces, provided the latter algebras are finitely generated. We pay special attention to the canonical embeddings of quotient spaces of reductive groups modulo the unipotent radicals of parabolic subgroups. For these varieties, we describe the orbital decomposition, compute the modality of the group action, and find out which of them are smooth. We also describe minimal ambient modules for these canonical embeddings provided that the acting group is simply connected.