On lattices over valuation rings of arbitrary rank (Q479783)

The author investigates how several results on \(p\)-adic lattices carry over to the setting of lattices over a \(2\)-Henselian valuation ring of arbitrary rank. First the Jordan decomposition and Witt cancellation are shown to behave nicely in the new setting. The remaining part of the paper is mainly devoted to the study of rank 2 lattices. A generalized Arf invariant is defined for rank 2 lattices and it is shown that it indeed is an invariant of the isomorphism class of the lattice. An additional invariant for lattices containing primitive elements with norms divisible by 2 is defined and it is shown that, together with a refined version of the generalized Arf invariant, these two invariants characterize isomorphism classes of such lattices. The final section discusses (in residue characteristic 2) when a Jordan decomposition is ``more canonical'' than another one, and presents some transformations which make a Jordan decomposition ``more canonical''.