Applications of de Jong's theorem on alterations (Q4945007)

The aim of the paper under review is to give a survey of some applications of de Jong's theorem on alterations [see \textit{A. J. de Jong}, Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 83, 51-93 (1996; Zbl 0916.14005)]. The first kind of applications regards the contravariant functors from some category of schemes to the category of \(\mathbb Q\)-vector spaces endowed with some extra structure (such as a Galois action). The second kind of applications regards some Grothendieck topologies which admit proper surjective morphisms as coverings (such as Deligne's topology of universal cohomological descent, or the \(h\)-topology of Suslin-Voevodsky). For such a topology, de Jong's theorem merely asserts it is locally smooth. From this point of view one generalizes or improves results due to Deligne, Suslin and Voevodsky. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0932.00042].