Spherical roots of spherical varieties

Abstract: Brion proved that the valuation cone of a complex spherical variety is a fundamental domain for a finite reflection group, called the little Weyl group. The principal goal of this paper is to generalize this fundamental theorem to fields of characteristic unequal to 2. We also prove a weaker version which holds in characteristic 2, as well. Our main tool is a generalization of Akhiezer's classification of spherical rank-1-varieties.