The mass of unimodular lattices (Q2569014)

Since the local-global principle fails for the integral theory of quadratic forms in general, Smith, Minkowski and Siegel established so called mass formulae for integral quadratic forms. Such formulae can be simply reformulated using adelic language by Kneser, Tamagawa and Weil. The computation of mass of a genus of quadratic form is given by local factors for all finite primes. In this paper, the local factors are computed by using Bruhat-Tits theory for unimodular lattices. Such method is quite simple and conceptual especially for \(p=2\).