Group schemes and local densities of quadratic lattices in residue characteristic 2

Abstract

The celebrated Smith–Minkowski–Siegel mass formula expresses the mass of a quadratic lattice $(L,Q)$ as a product of local factors, called the local densities of $(L,Q)$ . This mass formula is an essential tool for the classification of integral quadratic lattices. In this paper, we will describe the local density formula explicitly by observing the existence of a smooth affine group scheme $\underline{G}$ over $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ with generic fiber $\text{Aut}_{\mathbb{Q}_{2}}(L,Q)$ , which satisfies $\underline{G}(\mathbb{Z}_{2})=\text{Aut}_{\mathbb{Z}_{2}}(L,Q)$ . Our method works for any unramified finite extension of $\mathbb{Q}_{2}$ . Therefore, we give a long awaited proof for the local density formula of Conway and Sloane and discover its generalization to unramified finite extensions of $\mathbb{Q}_{2}$ . As an example, we give the mass formula for the integral quadratic form $Q_{n}(x_{1},\dots ,x_{n})=x_{1}^{2}+\cdots +x_{n}^{2}$ associated to a number field $k$ which is totally real and such that the ideal $(2)$ is unramified over $k$ .