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ESSENTIAL DIMENSION OF GENERIC SYMBOLS IN CHARACTERISTIC $p$
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2017
Abstract
In this article the $p$-essential dimension of generic symbols over fields of characteristic $p$ is studied. In particular, the $p$-essential dimension of the length $\ell$ generic $p$-symbol of degree $n+1$ is bounded below by $n+\ell$ when the base field is algebraically closed of characteristic $p$. The proof uses new techniques for working with residues in Milne–Kato $p$-cohomology and builds on work of Babic and Chernousov in the Witt group in characteristic 2. Two corollaries on $p$-symbol algebras (i.e, degree 2 symbols) result from this work. The generic $p$-symbol algebra of length $\ell$ is shown to have $p$-essential dimension equal to $\ell +1$ as a $p$-torsion Brauer class. The second is a lower bound of $\ell +1$ on the $p$-essential dimension of the functor $\operatorname{Alg}_{p^{\ell },p}$. Roughly speaking this says that you will need at least $\ell +1$ independent parameters to be able to specify any given algebra of degree $p^{\ell }$ and exponent $p$ over a field of characteristic $p$ and improves on the previously established lower bound of 3.
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- This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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- © The Author 2017
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