On the essential dimension of infinitesimal group schemes

We discuss essential dimension of group schemes, with particular attention to infinitesimal group schemes. We prove that the essential dimension of a group scheme of finite type over a field k is at least equal to the difference between the dimension of its Lie algebra and its dimension. Furthermore, we show that the essential dimension of a trigonalizable group scheme of length p^{n} over a field of characteristic p>0 is at most n. We give several examples.Comment: 11 pages; proof of Theorem 1.2 slightly changed; improved the exposition in section 4 and added Proposition 4.3. Accepted for publication in The American Journal of Mathematic

Stacks of cyclic covers of projective spaces

We define stacks of uniform cyclic covers of Brauer-Severi schemes, proving that they can be realized as quotient stacks of open subsets of representations, and compute the Picard group for the open substacks parametrizing smooth uniform cyclic covers. Moreover, we give an analogous description for stacks parametrizing triple cyclic covers of Brauer-Severi schemes of rank 1, which are not necessarily uniform, and give a presentation of the Picard group for substacks corresponding to smooth triple cyclic covers.Comment: 23 pages; some minor changes; to appear in Compositio Mathematic

On coverings of Deligne-Mumford stacks and surjectivity of the Brauer map

This paper proves a result on the existence of finite flat scheme covers of Deligne-Mumford stacks. This result is used to prove that a large class of smooth Deligne-Mumford stacks with affine moduli space are quotient stacks, and in the case of quasi-projective moduli space, to reduce the question to one concerning Brauer groups of schemes.Comment: LaTeX, 7 page

Higher algebraic K-theory for actions of diagonalizable groups

We study the K-theory of actions of diagonalizable group schemes on noetherian regular separated algebraic spaces: our main result shows how to reconstruct the K-theory ring of such an action from the K-theory rings of the loci where the stabilizers have constant dimension. We apply this to the calculation of the equivariant K-theory of toric varieties, and give conditions under which the Merkurjev spectral sequence degenerates, so that the equivariant K-theory ring determines the ordinary K-theory ring. We also prove a very refined localization theorem for actions of this type.Comment: Addendum contains mainly a corrected definition of specialization maps, the previous one being wrong as noticed by A. Neeman. All the other results (in particular the main results) still hold. Several other typos also correcte