English

Combing a hedgehog over a field

Algebraic Geometry 2025-11-18 v4

Abstract

We investigate the question of the existence of a non-vanishing section of the tangent bundle on a smooth affine quadric hypersurface QoQ^o over a given perfect field kk. In case QoQ^o admits a kk-rational point, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for such existence. We apply these conditions in a number of examples, including the case of the algebraic nn-sphere over kk, SknAkn+1S^n_k\subset \mathbb{A}^{n+1}_k, defined by the equation i=1n+1xi2=1\sum_{i=1}^{n+1}x_i^2=1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.07486,
  title  = {Combing a hedgehog over a field},
  author = {Alexey Ananyevskiy and Marc Levine},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.07486},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

added to the introduction information about the origin and atribution of the main question. Added a construction of an explicit section over the 2-adics by Peter M\"uller. This is the final version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:19:36.142Z