Decomposability of orthogonal involutions in degree 12 (Q2305478)

A theorem of \textit{A. Pfister} [Invent. Math. 1, 116--132 (1966; Zbl 0142.27203)] asserts that every 12-dimensional quadratic form with trivial discriminant and trivial Clifford invariant over a field of characteristic different from 2 decomposes as a tensor product of a binary quadratic form and a 6-dimensional quadratic form with trivial discriminant. The main result of this paper extends Pfister's result to algebras with orthogonal involutions: Theorem 1.3. Every central simple algebra of degree 12 with orthogonal involution of trivial discriminant and trivial Clifford invariant decomposes into a tensor product of a quaternion algebra and a central simple algebra of degree 6 with orthogonal involutions. This decomposition is used to establish a criterion for the existence of orthogonal involutions with trivial invariants on algebras of degree 12, and to calculate the \(f_3\)-invariant of the involution if the algebra has index 2 (Theorem 2.3).