Hyperplane arrangements and K-theory (Q2502939)

The complexification of a real hyperplane arrangement \(\mathcal A\) carries a natural \(\mathbb Z_2\)-action given by complex conjugation. In this paper, the author computes the rational \(\mathbb Z_2\)-equivariant Grothendieck K- and KO-rings of the complement \(\mathcal M\) of the complexification of \(\mathcal A\), and gives two different combinatorial descriptions of the subring Line\((\mathcal M)\) of the KO-ring generated by equivariant line bundles. (One of these descriptions only applies to simple arrangements.) A key ingredient is provided by the basic example where the real arrangement consists of a point on a line, so that \({\mathcal M}=\{\text{pt}\}\); here, Line\((\{\text{pt}\})=\mathbb Z[x]/x(2-x)\). The first description (furnished by the main result in the paper, Theorem~3.10) presents Line\((\mathcal M)\) as the ring \(\mathbb Z[e_1,e_2,\dots,e_n,x]/{\mathcal I_A}\), with an explicit generating set for the ideal~\(\mathcal I_A\). Here \(n\) denotes the number of hyperplanes. The second description applies only to simple arrangements, and identifies Line\((\mathcal A)\) as a certain subring \(B(\mathcal A)\) of \[ \text{Line}\big({\mathcal C(A)}\big) \;\cong \;\bigoplus_{C\subseteq\mathcal C(A)} \mathbb Z[x]/x(2-x), \] where the sum runs over the connected components \(C\) of the complement \(\mathcal C(A)\) of the real arrangement. Here, the essential technical tool are \textit{nbc}-sets, related to broken circuits of the pointed oriented matroid determined by~\(\mathcal A\).