On the Witt rings of function fields of quasihomogeneous varieties (Q4340463)

The paper consists of eight sections. The first presents the class of varieties under consideration, in the second notation and technical tools are introduced, third - formulation of main results, fourth and fifth - results on (unramified) Witt rings of fields of fractions of graded rings, and the remaining sections contain proofs. The Witt ring of certain quasi-projective surfaces, which are bundles over a curve with fiber \({\mathbb A}^1\) or \({\mathbb A}^1\backslash \{pt\}\) is studied. As an example the affine plane is treated (Corollary 6); the main result (Corollary 7 and Corollary 8) deals with the open complement \(V_n^{*}\) of the vertex \(P=(x,y,z)\) in the affine cone \(V_n=\) Spec\(K[x,y,z]/(yz-x^n)\): the Witt ring of the variety \( V_{2m+1}^{*}=V_{2m+1}\backslash \{P\}\) is extended from \(K\) (\( W(V_{2m+1}^{*})\cong W(K)\cdot \langle 1\rangle \)) while the Witt ring of the variety \(V_{2m}^{*}=V_{2m}\backslash \{P\}\) is nontrivial for \(m\geq 1\) -- there is a group isomorphism \(W(V_{2m}^{*})\cong W(K)\cdot \langle 1\rangle \oplus W(K)b\). An explicit construction of a generator \(b\) of the additional direct summand (a bilinear form on an invertible module) is given. The ring structure in \(W(V_{2m}^{*})\) is given by an explicit formula for \( W(V_{2m}^{*})\hookrightarrow W(K(V_{2m}))\). The result on the existence of a non extended Witt class is obvious: \(\text{Pic}(V_n)={\mathbb Z}/n\) and for \(n=2m\) the element of order two is a selfdual line bundle, and a line bundle can not be stably metabolic. The proof that its Witt class is not extended, i.e. is not in the direct summand \(W(K)\cdot \langle 1\rangle \) is more difficult. Unramified Witt rings of the normal cone, i.e. the scheme \(\text{Spec }S\) for an integral normal graded ring \(S=\bigoplus S_d\), without the usual assumption that \(S=S_0[S_1]\) (quasi-homogeneous cones) are computed. Results on the unramified Witt ring follow from the general Theorem 1 (p. 201), which expresses the Witt ring of the field of fractions \(K(S)\) (\(K(\text{Spec}S)\)) of the graded ring \(S\) in terms of the Witt ring of the field \(\widetilde{K}\) of homogeneous degree \(0\) fractions of the ring \(S\) (\(K(\text{Proj }S)\)). In addition an orthogonal space over \(K(S)\), with Witt class in \(W_{nr}(\text{Spec }S)\) has a diagonalization with homogeneous diagonal entries (Corollary 2).