THE ARASON INVARIANT and MOD 2 ALGEBRAIC CYCLES Contents
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY Volume 11, Number 1, January 1998, Pages 73{118 S 0894-0347(98)00248-3 THE ARASON INVARIANT AND MOD 2 ALGEBRAIC CYCLES HEL´ ENE` ESNAULT, BRUNO KAHN, MARC LEVINE, AND ECKART VIEHWEG Contents Introduction 73 1. Review of the Arason invariant 75 2. The special Clifford group 76 3. -cohomology of split reductive algebraic groups 78 4. K-cohomology of BG 86 5. KGL(N) and Cliff(n, n)92 6. Two invariants for Clifford bundles 95 7. Snaking a Bloch-Ogus differential 100 8. Proof of Theorem 1 101 9. Application to quadratic forms 102 Appendix A. Toral descent 104 Appendix B. The Rost invariant 108 Appendix C. An amusing example 113 Acknowledgements 116 References 116 Introduction In topology, one associates to a complex quadratic vector bundle E over a topo- logical space X its Stiefel-Whitney classes i wi(E) H (X, Z/2). ∈ These classes are essentially the only characteristic classes attached to qua- dratic bundles: any such bundle is classified by the homotopy class of a map X BO(n, C)wherenis the rank of E. The classifying space BO(n, C)has → a tautological quadratic bundle of rank n,andH∗(BO(n, C), Z/2) is a polyno- mial algebra on the Stiefel-WhitneyE classes of . The same holds in algebraic geometry, whereE to any quadratic vector bundle E over a Z[1/2]-scheme X (a vector bundle provided with a unimodular symmetric bilinear form) one can attach Stiefel-Whitney classes, living in mod 2 ´etale coho- mology [17] i wi(E) H´et(X, Z/2).
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