Stable motivic \(\pi_1\) of low-dimensional fields (Q406292)

Thinking of spheres as the building blocks in stable homotopy theory, one might consider the homotopy groups of the sphere spectrum as the most fundamental invariant of homotopy theory. To compute the stable homotopy groups of spheres is a long-standing and extremely difficult task in algebraic topology. In [Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 90, 45--143 (1999; Zbl 0983.14007)], \textit{F. Morel} and \textit{V. Voevodsky} invented an algebro-geometric or motivic version of the homotopy category. It provides a natural extension of the category of smooth schemes over a fixed base scheme \(S\) (in the same way as the homotopy category extends the world of manifolds in topology) in which the affine line (over \(S\)) has been made trivial (in the way the unit interval is trivial in the classical homotopy category) and the smash product with the projective line has been made invertible (replacing the role of the unit circle). Now one may ask what are the homotopy groups (or rather homotopy sheaves) of the motivic sphere spectrum over \(S\). The answer will depend on the choice of \(S\), and the more general \(S\) is the more difficult it will be to give an answer. Thinking of the aforementioned sphere spectrum in classical algebraic topology as the motivic sphere spectrum over a trivial base, one may guess how hard the motivic problem can be if we allow arbitrary bases. So the first and very important step is to understand the case where the base scheme \(S\) is a field \(k\). As an example of the rising complexity, one may consider the famous theorem of Morel which states that \(\pi_0\) of the motivic sphere spectrum over a field \(k\) is given by the Grothendieck-Witt ring of \(k\) (instead of the integers in the classical case). In this exciting article the authors provide the difficult and fundamental calculation of \(\pi_1\) of the motivic sphere spectrum over a large class of fields, i.e., fields of cohomological dimension at most \(2\). This extends the work of Morel, Asok, Fasel and others on low degree motivic homotopy groups. As one may guess from Morel's theorem that we mentioned above the answer involves the Milnor- and Milnor-Witt K-theory of the base field. (Since the precise statement would require much more notation, we omit the full answer in this brief review.) The calculation is based on two building blocks. First, by an arithmetic square argument (or arithmetic fracture method), it suffices to make the calculations for the motivic sphere spectrum localized at one prime at a time, and after localization at the rationals. Second, for each prime, the authors study the motivic Adams-Novikov spectral sequence and trace the motivic Hopf maps in this spectral sequence. This step extends the work of Morel, \textit{D. Dugger} and \textit{D. C. Isaksen} in [Geom. Topol. 14, No. 2, 967--1014 (2010; Zbl 1206.14041)] and others. Along the way, the authors provide a lot of interesting information on the homotopy sheaves of the motivic Brown-Peterson spectrum and the operations on it.