The Chow ring of the Cayley plane

Abstract

We give a full description of the Chow ring of the complex Cayley plane, the simplest of the exceptional flag varieties. We describe explicitely the most interesting of its Schubert varieties and compute their intersection products. Translating our results in the Borel presentation, i.e. in terms of Weyl group invariants, we are able to compute the degree of the variety of reductions $Y_8$ introduced in our related preprint math.AG/0306328.