Witt groups of complex cellular varieties

Abstract

We show that the Grothendieck-Witt and Witt groups of smooth complex cellular varieties can be identified with their topological KO-groups. As an application, we deduce the values of the Witt groups of all irreducible hermitian symmetric spaces, including smooth complex quadrics, spinor varieties and symplectic Grassmannians.

43 pages. This is the final version, identical in content to the paper published in Documenta Mathematica