Shells of twisted flag varieties and the Rost invariant (Q254766)

The Chow motive, a concept introduced by Grothendieck, which has become a fundamental tool for investigating the structure of algebraic varieties, provides one of the few tools for studying the geometry of certain varieties. Computing it has also proved to be valuable for addressing questions on other different topics. In this paper, authors develop two general methods to calculate the Chow motives of some twisted flag varieties over an arbitrary field, for which that computation has not been previously possible. The first of them deals with shells and generalizes \textit{A. Vishik}'s [Lect. Notes Math. 1835, 25--101 (2004; Zbl 1047.11033)] shells of quadratic forms and extends \textit{N. A. Karpenko}'s [J. Reine Angew. Math. 677, 179--198 (2013; Zbl 1267.14009)] results on the upper motives. The second one is based on a formula of \textit{V. Chernousov} and \textit{A. Merkurjev} [Transform. Groups 11, No. 3, 371--386 (2006; Zbl 1111.14009)] and provides a broad generalization on the generic point diagram, which is, as it is well-known, a standard tool in the theory of Chow motives. Both methods are complementary to each other. Indeed, the first of them is designed to eliminate certain decomposition types and the second one is designed to prove that the remaining decomposition types are realizable. Finally, the authors also settle a a 20-year-old conjecture of Markus Rost [Letter to Jean-Pierre Serre (1992)] about the Rost invariant for groups of type \(E_7\).