English

Compactly supported $\mathbb{A}^1$-Euler characteristics of symmetric powers of cellular varieties

Algebraic Geometry 2026-02-25 v2 K-Theory and Homology

Abstract

The compactly supported A1\mathbb{A}^1-Euler characteristic, introduced by Hoyois and later refined by Levine and others, is an anologue in motivic homotopy theory of the classical Euler characteristic of complex topological manifolds. It is an invariant on the Grothendieck ring of varieties K0(Vark)\mathrm{K}_0(\mathrm{Var}_k) taking values in the Grothendieck-Witt ring GW(k)\mathrm{GW}(k) of the base field kk. The former ring has a natural power structure induced by symmetric powers of varieties. In a recent preprint, Pajwani and P\'al construct a power structure on GW(k)\mathrm{GW}(k) and show that the compactly supported A1\mathbb{A}^1-Euler characteristic respects these two power structures for 00-dimensional varieties, or equivalently \'etale kk-algebras. In this paper, we define the class Symk\mathrm{Sym}_k of symmetrisable varieties to be those varieties for which the compactly supported A1\mathbb{A}^1-Euler characteristic respects the power structures and study the algebraic properties of K0(Symk)\mathrm{K}_0(\mathrm{Sym}_k). We show that it includes all cellular varieties, and even linear varieties as introduced by Totaro. Moreover, we show that it includes non-linear varieties such as elliptic curves. As an application of our main result, we compute the compactly supported A1\mathbb{A}^1-Euler characteristics of symmetric powers of Grassmannians and certain del Pezzo surfaces.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.08486,
  title  = {Compactly supported $\mathbb{A}^1$-Euler characteristics of symmetric powers of cellular varieties},
  author = {Jesse Pajwani and Herman Rohrbach and Anna M. Viergever},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.08486},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

21 pages, minor revisions