Today I’m going to start a series on the arithmetic of rational surfaces. I feel like this theory is fairly unknown, but it provides such a wonderful source of examples that don’t exist in the curve case. Everything is so explicit with equations and concrete calculations.
The theorem I want to get to is in Bloch’s paper “On the Chow Groups of Certain Rational Surfaces.” It says that for a certain class of rational surfaces, good/bad reduction can be detected on the Chow group of 
-cycles of degree . We will also pull a lot from Manin’s book Cubic Surfaces and possibly from some papers of Colliet-Thélène.
Rather than prove this amazing result, I want to describe some of the constructions and ideas that go into it. Let’s get some terminology out of the way. For our purposes, a projective surface 
will be called rational if there exists some 
for which the extension of scalars 
is birational with 
.
Fix an algebraic closure 
and let 
. Nothing in the immediate theory should require this, but since the goal is a theorem about reduction type, without loss of generality 
is either assumed global or complete, local, arising as the fraction field of some DVR of mixed characteristic. If you want to push the theory through for positive characteristic, you will need to at least alter all the to 
.
Bloch’s proof involves playing around with Brauer groups and in particular realizing a certain pairing of Manin in a new way. Our goal for today will just be to work out some of the basic Brauer group theory. Recall that 
. Unless otherwise stated, all cohomology will be étale or Galois (the distinction should be obvious from context and so subscripts will be omitted). This means that 
.
First, we’ll check that there is a map 
in a sort of ridiculous way, because we’ll need to use the map involved at a later point. For étale cohomology, we have the convergent first-quadrant Hochschild-Serre spectral sequence 
. Thus writing 
and using that 
is a quotient of 
we get a map via inclusion then projection.
Given any point 
, we have a finite index subgroup 
of 
. By functoriality of Galois cohomology, this gives us two group homomorphisms. The restriction, 
and corestriction (aka the transfer), 
. A well-known property of these two maps is that ![{(cor)\circ (res)=[G: G']}](http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%7B%28cor%29%5Ccirc+%28res%29%3D%5BG%3A+G%27%5D%7D&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0 "{(cor)\circ (res)=[G: G']}")
is multiplication by the index (or by Galois theory in this case, ![{[k(x_i):k]}](http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%7B%5Bk%28x_i%29%3Ak%5D%7D&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0 "{[k(x_i):k]}")
).
The last map we need before we can piece together Manin’s pairing is that we can pullback on cohomology given a point 
. We denote this by 
(thought of as the Brauer class restricted to 
). Define 
to be the free abelian group generated by the points of 
(i.e. -cycles) of degree . Caution: This is not the Chow group or anything because we aren’t moding out by any sort of rational or algebraic equivalence yet. We only require degree .
For those not used to the degree map when over non-algebraically closed fields, recall that ![{deg(\sum n_ix_i)=\sum [k(x_i): k]n_i}](http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%7Bdeg%28%5Csum+n_ix_i%29%3D%5Csum+%5Bk%28x_i%29%3A+k%5Dn_i%7D&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0 "{deg(\sum n_ix_i)=\sum [k(x_i): k]n_i}")
, so it is possible that 
is a degree cycle if the residue field extensions are 
and 
respectively.
The Manin pairing is 
given by 
. Certainly at the level of 
everything is well-defined by the above maps. There is some work in checking that we can pass to the quotient.
Here is why it works. If we take a class 
that is in already in 
, then 
is just 
(this is somewhat non-obvious from our definition). Now given any element 
we need to check that it pairs with 
to 
. We crucially use our arithmetic definition of degree here.
![\displaystyle \begin{matrix} (\sum n_ix_i, a) & = & \displaystyle \prod_i cor_{k(x_i)/k}(a(x_i))^{n_i} \\ & = & \displaystyle\prod_i (cor_{k(x_i)/k}\circ res)(a^{n_i}) \\ & = & \displaystyle\prod_i a^{[k(x_i):k]n_i} \\ & = & \displaystyle a^{\sum [k(x_i):k]n_i} \\ & = & a^0 =1 \end{matrix}](http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cdisplaystyle+%5Cbegin%7Bmatrix%7D+%28%5Csum+n_ix_i%2C+a%29+%26+%3D+%26+%5Cdisplaystyle+%5Cprod_i+cor_%7Bk%28x_i%29%2Fk%7D%28a%28x_i%29%29%5E%7Bn_i%7D+%5C%5C+%26+%3D+%26+%5Cdisplaystyle%5Cprod_i+%28cor_%7Bk%28x_i%29%2Fk%7D%5Ccirc+res%29%28a%5E%7Bn_i%7D%29+%5C%5C+%26+%3D+%26+%5Cdisplaystyle%5Cprod_i+a%5E%7B%5Bk%28x_i%29%3Ak%5Dn_i%7D+%5C%5C+%26+%3D+%26+%5Cdisplaystyle+a%5E%7B%5Csum+%5Bk%28x_i%29%3Ak%5Dn_i%7D+%5C%5C+%26+%3D+%26+a%5E0+%3D1+%5Cend%7Bmatrix%7D&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0 "\displaystyle \begin{matrix} (\sum n_ix_i, a) & = & \displaystyle \prod_i cor_{k(x_i)/k}(a(x_i))^{n_i} \\ & = & \displaystyle\prod_i (cor_{k(x_i)/k}\circ res)(a^{n_i}) \\ & = & \displaystyle\prod_i a^{[k(x_i):k]n_i} \\ & = & \displaystyle a^{\sum [k(x_i):k]n_i} \\ & = & a^0 =1 \end{matrix}")
This gives us a well-defined pairing which I’ll refer to as the Manin pairing (non-standard terminology to my knowledge). We say that two rational points 
are Brauer equivalent if 
for all . The key idea of the next post will be to rewrite this pairing in a way that allows us to check that for a smooth rational surface over a global field the set of rational points up to Brauer equivalence: 
is finite. But more importantly, the set has only one element (i.e. all points are Brauer equivalent) at places of good reduction.
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