Isotropy of unitary involutions

We prove the so-called Unitary Isotropy Theorem, a result on isotropy of a unitary involution. The analogous previously known results on isotropy of orthogonal and symplectic involutions as well as on hyperbolicity of orthogonal, symplectic, and unitary involutions are formal consequences of this theorem. A component of the proof is a detailed study of the quasi-split unitary grassmannians.Comment: final version, to appear in Acta Mat

Unitary grassmannians

We study projective homogeneous varieties under an action of a projective unitary group (of outer type). We are especially interested in the case of (unitary) grassmannians of totally isotropic subspaces of a hermitian form over a field, the main result saying that these grassmannians are 2-incompressible if the hermitian form is generic. Applications to orthogonal grassmannians are provided.Comment: 25 page

Holes in I^n

Let F be an arbitrary field of characteristic not 2. We write W(F) for the Witt ring of F, consisting of the isomorphism classes of all anisotropic quadratic forms over F. For any element x of W(F), dimension dim x is defined as the dimension of a quadratic form representing x. The elements of all even dimensions form an ideal denoted I(F). The filtration of the ring W(F) by the powers I(F)^n of this ideal plays a fundamental role in the algebraic theory of quadratic forms. The Milnor conjectures, recently proved by Voevodsky and Orlov-Vishik-Voevodsky, describe the successive quotients I(F)^n/I(F)^{n+1} of this filtration, identifying them with Galois cohomology groups and with the Milnor K-groups modulo 2 of the field F. In the present article we give a complete answer to a different old-standing question concerning I(F)^n, asking about the possible values of dim x for x in I(F)^n. More precisely, for any positive integer n, we prove that the set dim I^n of all dim x for all x in I(F)^n and all F consisists of 2^{n+1}-2^i, i=1,2,...,n+1 together with all even integers greater or equal to 2^{n+1}. Previously available partial informations on dim I^n include the classical Arason-Pfister theorem, saying that no integer between 0 and 2^n lies in dim I^n, as well as a recent Vishik's theorem, saying the same on the integers between 2^n and 2^n+2^{n-1} (the case n=3 is due to Pfister, n=4 to Hoffmann). Our proof is based on computations in Chow groups of powers of projective quadrics (involving the Steenrod operations); the method developed can be also applied to other types of algebraic varieties.Comment: 29 page

Incompressibility of orthogonal grassmannians

We prove the following conjecture due to Bryant Mathews (2008). Let Q be the orthogonal grassmannian of totally isotropic i-planes of a non-degenerate quadratic form q over an arbitrary field (where i is an integer in the interval [1, (\dim q)/2]). If the degree of each closed point on Q is divisible by 2^i and the Witt index of q over the function field of Q is equal to i, then the variety Q is 2-incompressible.Comment: 5 page

Fundamental solution of the Volkov problem (characteristic representation)

The characteristic representation, or Goursat problem, for the Klein-Fock-Gordon equation with Volkov interaction [1] is regarded. It is shown that in this representation the explicit form of the Volkov propagator can be obtained. Using the characteristic representation technique, the Schwinger integral [2] in the Volkov problem can be calculated