Comparison theorems for conic bundles

Abstract

In (10), M. S. Narasimhan and S. Ramanan proved a theorem to the effect that a certain conic bundle associated with a non-singular quadratic complex does not come from a vector bundle ((10), proposition 8·1); a similar topological result was proved in (12). In the course of attempting to extend these results to the singular case, I found that I wanted to use some results on conic bundles which were not readily available in the literature. The object of this note is to give proofs of these results; the work on quadratic complexes is still in progress and the first part will appear shortly (13). A further application will appear in (14).