Rost invariant of the center, revisited

Abstract

Abstract. The Rost invariant of the Galois cohomology of a simple simply connected algebraic group over a field F is defined regardless of the characteristic of F , but unfortunately some formulas for it are only known with some hypothesis on the the characteristic. We improve those formulas by (1) removing the hypothesis on the characteristic and (2) removing an ad hoc pairing that appears in the original formulas. As a preliminary step of independent interest, we also extend the classification of invariants of quasi-trivial tori to all fields.