Brauer groups and Galois cohomology of function fields of varieties Jason Michael Starr Department of Mathematics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794 E-mail address:
[email protected] Contents 1. Acknowledgments 5 2. Introduction 7 Chapter 1. Brauer groups and Galois cohomology 9 1. Abelian Galois cohomology 9 2. Non-Abelian Galois cohomology and the long exact sequence 13 3. Galois cohomology of smooth group schemes 22 4. The Brauer group 29 5. The universal cover sequence 34 Chapter 2. The Chevalley-Warning and Tsen-Lang theorems 37 1. The Chevalley-Warning Theorem 37 2. The Tsen-Lang Theorem 39 3. Applications to Brauer groups 43 Chapter 3. Rationally connected fibrations over curves 47 1. Rationally connected varieties 47 2. Outline of the proof 51 3. Hilbert schemes and smoothing combs 54 4. Ramification issues 63 5. Existence of log deformations 68 6. Completion of the proof 70 7. Corollaries 72 Chapter 4. The Period-Index theorem of de Jong 75 1. Statement of the theorem 75 2. Abel maps over curves and sections over surfaces 78 3. Rational simple connectedness hypotheses 79 4. Rational connectedness of the Abel map 81 5. Rational simply connected fibrations over a surface 82 6. Discriminant avoidance 84 7. Proof of the main theorem for Grassmann bundles 86 Chapter 5. Rational simple connectedness and Serre’s “Conjecture II” 89 1. Generalized Grassmannians are rationally simply connected 89 2. Statement of the theorem 90 3. Reductions of structure group 90 Bibliography 93 3 4 1. Acknowledgments Chapters 2 and 3 notes are largely adapted from notes for a similar lecture series presented at the Clay Mathematics Institute Summer School in G¨ottingen, Germany in Summer 2006.