Duality of Albanese and Picard 1-motives

We define Albanese and Picard 1-motives of smooth (simplicial) schemes over a perfect field. For smooth proper schemes, these are the classical Albanese and Picard varieties. For a curve, these are t he homological 1-motive of Lichtenbaum and the motivic $H^1$ of Deligne. This paper proves a conjecture of Deligne about providing an algebraic description, via 1-motives, of the first homology and cohomology groups of a complex algebraic variety. (L. Barbieri-Viale and V. Srinivas have also proved this independently.) It also contains a purely algebraic proof of Lichtenbaum's conjecture that the Albanese and the Picard 1-motives of a (simplicial) scheme are dual. This gives a new proof of an unpublished theorem of Lichtenbaum that Deligne's 1-motive of a curve is dual to Lichtenbaum's 1-motive.Comment: 29 pages, no figures, Latex. to appear in K-Theory Journa

Values of zeta functions at s=1/2

We study the behaviour near s=1/2 of zeta functions of varieties over finite fields F_q with q a square. The main result is an Euler-characteristic formula for the square of the special value at s=1/2. The Euler-characteristic is constructed from the Weil-etale cohomology of a certain supersingular elliptic curve.Comment: Submitted version. IMRN (to appear