Induced orthogonal representations of Galois groups (Q2655036)

Let \(F\) be a field and \(E/F\) a finite Galois extension with a Galois group \(\mathcal{G}(E/F) = H\), and suppose that \(G\) is a finite group with a surjective homomorphism \(\pi \) on \(H\). The embedding problem related to \(H\), \(G\) and \(\pi \) aims at finding whether there exists a Galois extension \(L/F\) and an isomorphism \(\psi : \;\mathcal{G}(L/F) \to G\), such that \(E\) is an intermediate field of \(L/F\) and the composition \(\pi \circ \psi \) is the homomorphism \(r _ {L/E}\) of \(\mathcal{G}(L/F)\) on \(H\) defined by restriction of \(F\)-automorphisms of \(L\) on \(E\). The paper under review concentrates on the special case where the kernel \(A\) of \(\pi \) is of prime order \(p\) different from the characteristic of \(F\), and the action of \(H\) on \(A\) induced by conjugation in \(G\) is trivial. In addition, \(F\) is always assumed to contain a primitive \(p\)-th root of unity. In this setting, the solvability of the embedding problem is determined by the splitting of a certain crossed product \(F\)-algebra attached to the problem. This allows the author to find new obstructions to the embedding problem in case \(G = M(p^ n)\), the modular group of order \(p^ n\), as well as to describe all solutions when the obstruction vanishes. When \(p = 2\), he also finds the obstruction to one embedding problem given by a group extension of the dihedral group. The approach to the embedding problem in this paper makes particular interest in the case where there is an embedding \(\mu \) of \(H\) into the orthogonal group \(\text{O}(q)\) of a quadratic space \((V, q)\) of finite dimension \([V: F]\), \(q\) being a nondegenerate quadratic form defined over \(F\). The author assumes that \(\text{char}(F)\neq 2\), the image of \(\mu \) is included in the special orthogonal group \(\text{SO}(q)\), and \(H\) is a proper subgroup of a finite group \(H _ 1\). He considers \(H _ 1\) with the induced orthogonal representation \(\text{ind}\,\mu: H_ 1 \to O(q_ {\text{ind}\mu })\), and \(q\) as a quadratic form over a fixed separable closure \(F _ {\text{sep}}\) of \(F\). Observing that the spin group \(\text{Spin}(q)\) and the kernel \(\text{Pin}(q)\) of the spinor norm from the Clifford group \(C^{\ast}(q)\) into \(F^{\ast} = F \setminus \{0\}\) are double covers of \(\text{SO}(q)\) and \(\text{O}(q)\), respectively, he obtains double covers \(\widetilde H\) and \(\widetilde H _ 1\) of \(H\) and \(H _ 1\), respectively. The main result of the paper shows that if \(4 \mid [V: F]\), then the latter double cover equals the corestriction of the former one.