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On the Local Structure Theorem and equivariant geometry of cotangent bundles
Let $G$ be a connected reductive group acting on an irreducible normal algebraic variety $X$. We give a slightly improved version of Local Structure Theorems obtained by Knop and Timashev, which describe the action of some parabolic subgroup of $G$ on an open subset of $X$. We also extend various results of Vinberg and Timashev on the set of horospheres in $X$. We construct a family of nongeneric horospheres in $X$ and a variety $\Hor$ parameterizing this family, such that there is a rational $G$-equivariant symplectic covering of cotangent vector bundles $T^*\Hor \dashrightarrow T^*X$. As an application we recover the description of the image of the moment map of $T^*X$ obtained by Knop. In our proofs we use only geometric methods which do not involve differential operators.