Moving lemmas and the homotopy coniveau tower

Abstract

In this note we study the functoriality of the coniveau filtration in motivic homotopy theory via a moving lemma over a base scheme, extending previous works of Levine and Bachmann-Yakerson. The main result is that the motivic stable homotopy category can be modeled on a smaller site, the "smooth-smooth site". The proof is based on a new approach to the purity theorem of Morel-Voevodsky using specialization maps, which turns out to hold even in absence of the $\mathbb{A}^1$-homotopy invariance property. Applications to the homotopy coniveau tower and to higher Chow-Witt groups are given.