Twisted forms of classical hypersurfaces

Abstract

We count the twisted forms, over the field of real numbers and over finite fields, of the three classical families of smooth hypersurfaces with large automorphism group: the Fermat, Delsarte and Klein hypersurfaces. Our main tool is a counting formula for the Galois cohomology set of a smooth hypersurface whose automorphism group is the semidirect product of a diagonal abelian group and a group of permutations of the monomials of its defining equation. In order to apply this formula over finite fields, we extend the differential method of Oguiso and Yu to positive characteristic, and we compute the automorphism groups of the Fermat, Delsarte and Klein hypersurfaces over algebraically closed fields of positive characteristic under explicit arithmetic conditions on p. Over the reals, our count recovers a recent theorem of Sasaki on the real forms of Fermat hypersurfaces.

21 pages, Comments welcome