Galois closures of non-commutative rings and an application to Hermitian representations

Abstract: Galois closures of commutative rank n ring extensions were introduced by Bhargava and the second author. In this paper, we generalize the construction to the case of non-commutative rings. We show that non-commutative Galois closures commute with base change and satisfy a product formula. As an application, we give a uniform construction of many of the representations arising in arithmetic invariant theory, including many Vinberg representations.