Motivic and \'Etale Spanier-Whitehead duality and the Becker-Gottlieb transfer

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a theory of Becker-Gottlieb transfer based on Spanier-Whitehead duality that holds in both the motivic and \'etale settings for smooth quasi-projective varieties in as broad a context as possible: for example, for varieties over non-separably closed fields in all characteristics, and also for both the \'etale and motivic settings. In view of the fact that the most promising applications of the traditional Becker-Gottlieb transfer has been to torsors and Borel-style equivariant cohomology theories, we focus our applications to motivic cohomology theories for torsors as well as Borel-style equivariant motivic cohomology theories, both defined with respect to motivic spectra. We obtain several results in this direction, including a stable splitting in generalized motivic cohomology theories. Various further applications will be discussed in forthcoming papers.