Twisted quadratic foldings of root systems

The present paper is devoted to twisted foldings of root systems that generalize the involutive foldings corresponding to automorphisms of Dynkin diagrams. A motivating example is Lusztig’s projection of the root system of type E 8 E_8 onto the subring of icosians of the quaternion algebra, which gives the root system of type H 4 H_4 . By using moment graph techniques for any such folding, a map at the equivariant cohomology level is constructed. It is shown that this map commutes with characteristic classes and Borel maps. Restrictions of this map to the usual cohomology of projective homogeneous varieties, to group cohomology and to their virtual analogues for finite reflection groups are also introduced and studied.

Incompressibility of Products of Pseudo-homogeneous Varieties

We show that the conjectural criterion of p-incompressibility for products of projective homogeneous varieties in terms of the factors, previously known in a few special cases only, holds in general. Actually, the proof goes through for a wider class of varieties, including the norm varieties associated with symbols in Galois cohomology of arbitrary degree.

Rational maps between quasilinear hypersurfaces

We prove analogues of several well-known results concerning rational maps between quadrics for the class of so-called quasilinear p-hypersurfaces. These hypersurfaces are nowhere smooth over the base field, so many of the geometric methods which have been successfully applied to the study of projective homogeneous varieties over fields cannot be used. We are therefore forced to take an alternative approach, which is partly facilitated by the appearance of several non-traditional features in the study of these objects from an algebraic perspective. Our main results were previously known for the class of quasilinear quadrics. We provide new proofs here, because the original proofs do not immediately generalise for quasilinear hypersurfaces of higher degree.

Generically split projective homogeneous varieties. II

This article gives a complete classification of generically split projective homogeneous varieties. This project was begun in our previous article [PS10], but here we remove all restrictions on the characteristic of the base field, give a new uniform proof that works in all cases and in particular includes the case PGO2n+ which was missing in [PS10].

Reduced Steenrod operations and resolution of singularities

We give a new construction of a weak form of Steenrod operations for Chow groups modulo a prime number p for a certain class of varieties. This class contains projective homogeneous varieties which are either split or considered over a field admitting some form of resolution of singularities, for example any field of characteristic not p. These reduced Steenrod operations are sufficient for some applications to the theory of quadratic forms.