Certain quadratic forms of dimension at most 6 and function fields of characteristic 2 (Q1601480)

The problem of when an anisotropic quadratic form \(\varphi\) over \(F\) becomes isotropic over the function field \(F(\psi )\) of another form \(\psi\) over \(F\) has been studied in characteristic \(\neq 2\) in numerous papers by various authors in the past (including the present author himself, the reviewer, Izhboldin, Karpenko and others), but the results in characteristic \(2\) are rather sparse. In the paper under review, a systematic study of this question is undertaken over fields of characteristic \(2\) for certain types of forms \(\varphi\) of small dimension. The author includes the case of singular forms which adds technical difficulties which cannot occur in characteristic \(\neq 2\). Many of the auxiliary results on singular forms shown by the author and needed in the proofs of the main results are therefore of interest in their own right. Recall that over a field \(F\) of characteristic \(2\), each form \(\varphi\) is isometric to an orthogonal sum \(\varphi_r\perp\varphi_s\) with \(\varphi_r\) nonsingular of even dimension \(2r\), and \(\varphi_s\) totally singular of dimension \(s\). In such a decomposition, the pair \((r,s)\) is uniquely determined and called the type of \(\varphi\), and \(\varphi_s\) is just the restriction of the form \(\varphi\) to its radical and it is therefore uniquely determined. However, \(\varphi_r\) is generally not uniquely determined. Let \(\varphi\) and \(\psi\) be anisotropic forms over \(F\) of dimension \(\geq 2\). The main results give necessary and sufficient conditions for \(\varphi\) to be isotropic over \(F(\psi )\) in the cases where \(\varphi\) is of type \((r,s)\) with \(r+s\leq 3\), with the additional assumption in the case of type \((3,0)\) (i.e. \(\varphi\) is nonsingular and of dimension \(6\)) that the Arf-invarint \(\Delta (\varphi )\in F/\wp(F)\) be trivial (where \(\wp (F)=\{ a^2-a\,| \,a\in F\}\)).