Local-global principles for embedding of fields with involution into simple algebras with involution (Q983902)

In fundamental work on weakly commensurable arithmetic groups and isospectral locally symmetric spaces [Publ. Math. Inst. Hautes Etud. Sci. 109, 113--184 (2009; Zbl 1176.22011)] the authors encountered some problems related to embeddings of quaternion division algebras which they left open. In the present paper they put these problems in a general perspective of the local-global principles for embeddings and resolve them (except for a special case which we will mention below). In the introduction it is pointed out that while this work progressed the authors became aware of the fact that the questions about existence of local-global principles for embeddings were raised in various contexts by different mathematicians. In order to present the main results of the paper we need to recall some definitions. Let \(A\) be a central simple algebra of dimension \(n^2\) over a field \(L\), and let \(\tau\) be an involution of \(A\). Set \(K = L^\tau\) to be the subfield of \(L\) fixed by \(\tau\). The involution \(\tau\) is said to be of the \textit{first} (resp., \textit{second}) kind if the restriction \(\tau| L\) is trivial (resp., nontrivial); involutions of the second kind are often called \textit{unitary}. If \(\tau\) is an involution of the first kind, then it is either of \textit{symplectic} type (if \(\mathrm{dim}_L A^\tau = n(n-1)/2\)) or of \textit{orthogonal} type (if \(\mathrm{dim}_L A^\tau = n(n+1)/2\)). Let now \(E\) be an \(n\)-dimensional commutative étale \(L\)-algebra endowed with an automorphism \(\sigma\) of order two such that \(\sigma|L = \tau|L\). When \(K\) is a global field, we say that the \textit{local-global principle for embeddings} holds if the existence of \((L\otimes_K K_v)\)-embeddings \[ i_v: (E\otimes_K K_v, \sigma\otimes\mathrm{id}_{K_v}) \hookrightarrow (A\otimes_K K_v, \sigma\otimes\mathrm{id}_{K_v}) \text{ for all } v\in V^K \] (here \(V^K\) denotes the set of all places of \(K\)) implies the existence of an \(L\)-embedding \(i: (E,\sigma)\hookrightarrow (A,\tau)\) of algebras with involution. We can now state some of the results on the local-global principles for embeddings obtained by Prasad and Rapinchuk. Theorem A. Let \(L\) be a global field. Let \(A\) be a central simple \(L\)-algebra of dimension \(n^2\) with an involution \(\tau\), and let \(E/L\) be a field extension of degree \(n\) endowed with an involutive automorphism \(\sigma\) such that \(\sigma|L = \tau|L\). Then the local-global principle for the existence of an embedding \(i: (E,\sigma)\hookrightarrow (A,\tau)\) holds in each of the following situations: [(i)] \(\tau\) is an involution of the second kind; [(ii)] \(A = M_n(K)\), and \(\tau\) is an orthogonal involution; [(iii)] \(A = M_m(D)\), where \(D\) is a quaternion division algebra, \(m\) is odd, and \(\tau\) is an orthogonal involution. Theorem B(ii). Let \(A\) be a central simple \(K\)-algebra with an orthogonal involution \(\tau\), of dimension \(n^2\) with \(4\mid n\). Let \(\mathcal{I} = \mathcal{I}(A,\tau)\) be the set of orthogonal involutions \(\eta\) of \(A\) such that \((A\otimes_K K_v, \tau\otimes\mathrm{id}_{K_v}) \simeq (A \otimes_K K_v,\eta\otimes\mathrm{id}_{K_v})\) for all \(v \in V^K.\) Then given \(\eta \in \mathcal{I}\), one can find an \(\eta\)-invariant maximal field \(E_{\eta}\) in \(A\) so that if \(\nu \in \mathcal{I}\) is such that there exists an embedding \((E_{\eta} , \eta | E_{\eta}) \hookrightarrow (A , \nu)\), then \((A , \eta) \simeq (A , \nu)\). We refer to the paper for the details and other important results. Theorem B(ii) allows to show that for groups of type \(D_{2r}\) with \(r > 2\), weak commensurability of two arithmetic subgroups of an absolutely simple group of this type implies their commensurability (cf. Theorem~9.1). This settles the question which was left open in the work on weak commensurability and isospectrality cited above except for the case when the group is of type \(D_4\). The latter case was recently solved by Skip Garibaldi who also gave an alternative proof for Theorem~9.1 [``Weak commensurability and forms of \(\mathrm{Spin}_{4n}\)'', preprint]. In the Appendix the problem of existence of an embedding \(i: (E,\sigma)\hookrightarrow (A,\tau)\) is interpreted in terms of Galois cohomology and is related to the problem of finding a rational point on a certain homogeneous space.