Composition of quadratic forms and the Hurwitz-Radon function in characteristic 2 (Q1601621)

An old result by Pfister characterizes 3-fold Pfister forms up to similarity as those regular quadratic forms in dimension 8 with trivial discriminant and trivial Clifford invariant. Relying on basic properties of the spin representations and involutions of Clifford algebras, the author extends Pfister's result to characteristic 2. Nevertheless, the author's approach is also valid in arbitrary characteristic. Let \((V,q)\) be a regular quadratic space of even dimension \(2r\), \(r\neq 2\), with trivial discriminant and trivial Clifford invariant. It is shown how a regular quadratic form \(Q\) in the space \(W\) of either the half spinors or the spinors and a bilinear map \(V\times W\to W\), \((u,w)\mapsto v\cdot w\) with \(Q(v\cdot w)=\alpha q(v)Q(w)\) for any \(v\in V\) and any \(w\in W\), where \(\alpha\) is a suitable nonzero scalar, can be defined. The composition of quadratic forms obtained in this way \((V,\alpha q)\times(W,Q)\to(W,Q)\) is optimal in the sense that for any other composition of quadratic forms \((\widetilde V,\widetilde q)\times (\widetilde W,\widetilde Q)\to (\widetilde W,\widetilde Q)\), with \(\dim V=\dim \widetilde V\), the dimension of \(\widetilde W\) is a multiple of \(\dim W\). Moreover, \[ \dim W=\begin{cases} 2^{(\dim V-1)/2}, r\quad\text{even },r\neq 2\\ 2^{( \dim V)/2},\;r=2\quad \text{or }r\text{ is odd}\end{cases}. \] As a corollary, in any characteristic Pfister's result can be quoted as follows: Let \((V,q)\) be a regular quadratic space of dimension 8. The following conditions are equivalent: (a) \((V,q)\) has trivial discriminant and trivial Clifford invariant. (b) \((V,q)\) is similar to the norm of a Cayley algebra. The situation for regular quadratic spaces of odd dimension \(2r+1\) is very similar to the case of characteristic \(\neq 2\). Therefore the optimal \((W,Q)\) is constructed either on the space of spinors or on a direct sum of two copies of it. Here \[ \dim W=\begin{cases} 2^{(\dim V-1)/2} \quad\text{if }r>2\\ 2^{(\dim V+1) /2} \quad\text{if }r=1,2.\end{cases} \] From these results the Hurwitz-Radon function in characteristic 2 is deduced.