Potential theory over local and global fields. I (Q1188160)

The paper, which is the first of two parts, studies Arakelov-theoretic Green's pairings on complex curves, and generalizes them to pairings over other local fields. In the complex case, an explicit description is given for pairings induced by the Fubini-Study metric via projective embeddings. This description, in terms of the Hopf bundle and chordal distance on projective space, is then used to generalize the notion of Green's pairings to curves over other local fields. This provides a new construction of Néron's pairing on curves. By combining the contribution from all the places, a global pairing is obtained which, unlike Arakelov's pairing, uses potential theory at all the places, both finite and infinite. [See also the following review of part 2 of this paper; ibid. 384-432 (1992)].