The Hopf condition for bilinear forms over arbitrary fields (Q2461383)

The paper is a part of research testing various up-to-date invariants by producing bounds for the Hurwitz problem: determine triples of positive integers \(r,s,n\) such that a polynomial identity \[ \Biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{r}x_{i}^{2}\Biggr) \Biggl(\sum_{i=1}^{s}y_{i}^{2}\Biggr)= \sum_{i=1}^{n}z_{i}^{2} \] holds for some \(z_{1},z_{2},\dots ,z_{n}\in F[x_{1},x_{2},\dots ,x_{r},y_{1},y_{2},\ldots ,y_{s}]\). When \(F\) is the field of real numbers, Stiefel and Hopf proved that it is necessary that the binomial coefficients \(\binom{n}{i}\) are even for \(n-r<i<s\). The idea of generalization of the Hopf reasoning is the following: a tuple \((z_{1}:z_{2}:\dots :z_{n})\) satisfying the identity defines a morphism of quasi-projective algebraic varieties \[ (\mathbb{P}^{r-1}\backslash Q_{r-2})\times (\mathbb{P} ^{s-1}\backslash Q_{s-2})\rightarrow \mathbb{P}^{n-1}\backslash Q_{n-2} \] where \(Q_{r-2}\) is a quadric hypersurface \(\sum_{i=1}^{r}x_{i}^{2}=0\); so apply an invariant to this morphism. For example it is known that Chow groups give the Stiefel-Hopf condition when relevant quadrics contain no cycles of degree \(1\). The authors apply motivic cohomology here, obtaining the Stiefel-Hopf condition for an arbitrary field \(F\) of characteristic not \(2\). The paper contains a short and clear review of motivic cohomology, the computation of motivic cohomology of a (split) quadric hypersurface as a bigraded ring, and an explicit computation of the homomorphism \(H^{\ast -2,\ast -1}(Q_{n-1})\rightarrow H^{\ast ,\ast }(\mathbb{P}^{n})\). To do this some information on Chow ring of a quadric hypersurface is needed, so the authors included the complete and explicit computation of the graded ring \(\text{CH}^{\ast }(Q_{n-1})\) and its relation to \(\text{CH}^{\ast }(\mathbb{P}^{n})\) (known but with no good reference).