We show that the conjectural criterion of $p$-incompressibility for products of projective homogeneous varieties in terms of the factors, previously known in a few special cases only, holds in general. Actually, the proof goes through for a wider class of varieties, including the norm varieties associated with symbols in Galois cohomology of arbitrary degree.

We study a Hermitian form $h$ over a quaternion division algebra $Q$ over a field ($h$ is supposed to be alternating if the characteristic of the field is two). For generic $h$ and $Q$, for any integer $i\in [1,\;n/2]$, where $n:=\dim _{Q}h$, we show that the variety of $i$-dimensional (over $Q$) totally isotropic right subspaces of $h$ is $2$-incompressible. The proof is based on a computation of the Chow ring for the classifying space of a certain parabolic subgroup in a split simple adjoint affine algebraic group of type $C_{n}$. As an application, we determine the smallest value of the $J$-invariant of a non-degenerate quadratic form divisible by a $2$-fold Pfister form; we also determine the biggest values of the canonical dimensions of the orthogonal Grassmannians associated to such quadratic forms.

This article gives a complete classification of generically split projective homogeneous varieties. This project was begun in our previous article [PS10], but here we remove all restrictions on the characteristic of the base field, give a new uniform proof that works in all cases and in particular includes the case PGO2n+ which was missing in [PS10].

Let X be the variety obtained by the Weil transfer with respect to a quadratic separable field extension of a generalized Severi–Brauer variety. We study (and, in some cases, determine) the canonical dimension, incompressibility, and motivic indecomposability of X. We determine the canonical 2-dimension of X (in the general case).

We study the Chow group of zero-dimensional cycles for projective homogeneous varieties of semisimple algebraic groups. We show that in many cases this group has no torsion.