Injective metrics on buildings and symmetric spaces

In this article, we show that the Goldman-Iwahori metric on the space of all norms on a fixed vector space satisfies the Helly property for balls. On the non-Archimedean side, we deduce that most classical Bruhat-Tits buildings may be endowed with a natural piecewise $ell^infty$ metric which is injective. We also prove that most classical semisimple groups over non-Archimedean local fields act properly and cocompactly on Helly graphs. This gives another proof of biautomaticity for their uniform lattices. On the Archimedean side, we deduce that most classical symmetric spaces of non-compact type may be endowed with a natural piecewise $ell^infty$ metric which is coarsely Helly. We also prove that most classical semisimple groups over Archimedean local fields act properly and cocompactly on injective metric spaces. The only exception is the special linear group: if $n geq 3$ and $mathbb{K}$ is a local field, we show that $operatorname{SL}(n,mathbb{K})$ does not act properly and coboundedly on an injective metric space.