Galois cohomology of certain field extensions and the divisible case of Milnor-Kato conjecture

We prove the "divisible case" of the Milnor-Bloch-Kato conjecture (which is the first step of Voevodsky's proof of this conjecture for arbitrary prime l) in a rather clear and elementary way. Assuming this conjecture, we construct a 6-term exact sequence of Galois cohomology with cyclotomic coefficients for any finite extension of fields whose Galois group has an exact quadruple of permutational representations over it. Examples include cyclic groups, dihedral groups, the biquadratic group Z/2\times Z/2, and the symmetric group S_4. Several exact sequences conjectured by Bloch-Kato, Merkurjev-Tignol, and Kahn are proven in this way. In addition, we introduce a more sophisticated version of the classical argument known as "Bass-Tate lemma". Some results about annihilator ideals in Milnor rings are deduced as corollaries.Comment: LaTeX 2e, 17 pages. V5: Updated to the published version + small mistake corrected in Section 5. Submitted also to K-theory electronic preprint archives at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/K-theory/0589

On Albanese torsors and the elementary obstruction

We show that the elementary obstruction to the existence of 0-cycles of degree 1 on an arbitrary variety X (over an arbitrary field) can be expressed in terms of the Albanese 1-motives associated with dense open subsets of X. Arithmetic applications are given