We study projective homogeneous varieties under an action of a projective unitary group (of outer type). We are especially interested in the case of (unitary) grassmannians of totally isotropic subspaces of a hermitian form over a field, the main result saying that these grassmannians are 2-incompressible if the hermitian form is generic. Applications to orthogonal grassmannians are provided.

Unitary graphs are arc-transitive graphs with vertices the flags of Hermitian unitals and edges defined by certain elements of the underlying finite fields. They played a significant role in a recent classification of a class of arc-transitive graphs that admit an automorphism group acting imprimitively on the vertices. In this article, we prove that all unitary graphs are connected of diameter...