Motivic Gauß-Bonnet formulas

Abstract

The apparatus of motivic stable homotopy theory provides a notion of Euler characteristic for smooth projective varieties, valued in the Grothendieck-Witt ring of the base field. Previous work of the first author and recent work of Déglise-Jin-Khan establishes a "Gauß-Bonnet formula" relating this Euler characteristic to pushforwards of Euler classes in motivic cohomology theories. In this paper, we apply this formula to SL-oriented motivic cohomology theories to obtain explicit characterizations of this Euler characteristic. The main new input is a unicity result for pushforward maps in SL-oriented theories, identifying these maps concretely in examples of interest.

Final version-to appear in Algebra & Number Theory