Subtle Characteristic Classes

Abstract

We construct new subtle Stiefel--Whitney classes of quadratic forms. These classes are much more informative than the ones introduced by Milnor. In particular, they see all the powers of the fundamental ideal of the Witt ring, contain the Arason invariant and it's higher analogues. Moreover, the new classes allow to treat the J-invariant of quadrics. This invariant, introduced in 2005, has been so far completely isolated from characteristic classes. In addition, our classes allow to describe explicitly the structure of some motives associated with quadratic forms.