Quadratic quaternion forms, involutions and triality (Q5949810)

Any skew-Hermitian form over a quaternion division algebra \(D\) over a field of characteristic different from 2 determines a symmetric bilinear form over any separable subfield of \(D\). On the other hand, it is well known that quadratic forms behave nicer than symmetric bilinear forms in characteristic 2 and Seip-Hornix derived a complete characteristic free theory of quadratic quaternion forms and their associated invariants. Moreover, it appears that these quadratic quaternion forms are special cases of generalized quadratic forms over algebras with involution. The authors apply these generalized quadratic forms to give a characteristic free presentation of some results on forms and involutions (thus generalizing and strengthening previous results of Seip-Hornix's). In particular, they prove a characteristic free version of an exact sequence of Lewis, which connects Witt groups of quadratic and quaternion algebras. One of the main results of this paper is the description of a canonical one-to-one correspondence between quadratic pairs and \((\varepsilon,\sigma)\)-quadratic forms, as well as applications to the Clifford algebra (uniting previous definitions). The last part of the paper studies triality for 4-dimensional quadratic quaternion forms, whose associated forms are 3-Pfister forms. Actually, any such quadratic quaternion form is a triple \((\theta_1, \theta_2, \theta_3)\) of forms over quaternion algebras \(D_1\), \(D_2\) and \(D_3\) such that \([D_1][D_2][D_3]= 1\) in the Brauer group, and triality acts as permutations on such triples.