On the first Steenrod square for Chow groups

Abstract

We construct a weak version of the homological first Steenrod square, a natural transformation from the modulo two Chow group to the Chow group modulo two and two-torsion. No assumption is made on the characteristic of the base field. As an application, we generalize a theorem of Nikita Karpenko on the parity of the first Witt index of quadratic forms to the case of a base field of characteristic two.