Motives of unitary and orthogonal homogeneous varieties (Q2468526)

Let \(F\) be a field of characteristic different from 2 and let \(L/F\) be a quadratic field extension. Let \((W,h)\) be an \(L/F\)-Hermitian space of rank \(n\). Let \(q(v)=h(v,v)\) be the quadratic form over \(F\) associated to the Hermitian form \(h\). Both \(h\) and \(q\) give rise to projective homogeneous varieties as follows. For a quadratic space \((W,q)\), we let \(V(q)\) denote the associated quadratic hypersurface in the projective space \(P(W)\) defined by the vanishing of \(q\). This is a homogeneous space of dimension \(2n-2\) for the orthogonal group \(O(W,q)\). For a Hermitian space \((W,h)\), we define \(V(h)\) to be the variety of isotropic \(L\)-lines in \(W\). This is a homogeneous space of dimension \(2n-3\) for the unitary group \(U(W,h)\), and is a twisted form of the incidence variety. The main result of the paper says that the Grothendieck-Chow motives of \(V(q)\) and \(V(h)\) are related by means of the following isomorphism \[ M(V(q))\oplus \bigoplus_{i=1}^{n-2} M(P_L(W))(i) \simeq M(V(h))\oplus M(V(h))(1). \] Here \(M(P_L(W))=\bigoplus_{j=0}^{n-1} M(\text{Spec} L)(j)\) is the motive of a projective space of dimension \(n-1\) over \(L\). The proof is based on the construction of a \(P^1\)-fibration \(\text{Bl}_{S(W)}P_F(W) \to \text{tr}_{L/F} P_L(W)\), where \(\text{Bl}_{S(W)}P_F(W)\) is the blow-up along \(S(W)=\{[m] \mid \text{ann}_L(m)\neq 0\}\) and \(\text{tr}_{L/F}\) is the Weil restriction from \(L\) to \(F\).