Steenrod operations and symplectic arithmetic duality

Abstract

This expository article elaborates upon my talk at the 2025 AMS Summer Institute on Algebraic Geometry. It gives an introduction to a conjecture from Tate's 1966 Séminaire Bourbaki report, predicting the existence of a symplectic form on Brauer groups of surfaces over finite fields, and then an informal tour of the proof in \cite{Feng20} and \cite{CF}.