Unitary groups over local rings

Abstract

We study hermitian forms and unitary groups defined over a local ring, not necessarily commutative, equipped with an involution. When the ring is finite we obtain formulae for the order of the unitary groups as well as their point stabilizers, and use these to compute the degrees of the irreducible constituents of the Weil representation of a unitary group associated to a ramified quadratic extension of a finite local ring.