On motivic obstructions to Witt cancellation for quadratic forms over schemes

Abstract

The paper provides computations of the first non-vanishing $\mathbb{A}^1$-homotopy sheaves of the orthogonal Stiefel varieties which are relevant for the unstable isometry classification of quadratic forms over smooth affine schemes over perfect fields of characteristic $\neq 2$. Together with the $\mathbb{A}^1$-representability for quadratic forms, this provides the first obstructions for rationally trivial quadratic forms to split off a hyperbolic plane. For even-rank quadratic forms, this first obstruction is a refinement of the Euler class of Edidin and Graham. A couple of consequences are discussed, such as improved splitting results over algebraically closed base fields as well as examples where the obstructions are nontrivial.