Witt groups of complex cellular varieties

Abstract

We show that the Grothendieck-Witt and Witt groups of smooth complex cellular varieties can be identified with their topological KO-groups. As an application, we deduce the values of the Witt groups of all irreducible hermitian symmetric spaces, including smooth complex quadrics, spinor varieties and symplectic Grassmannians.Comment: 43 pages. This is the final version, identical in content to the paper published in Documenta Mathematic