Decomposition of Witt Rings

Abstract

We take the definition of a Witt ring to be that given in [13], i.e., it is what is called a strongly representational Witt ring in [8]. The classical example is obtained by considering quadratic forms over a field of characteristic ≠ 2 [17], but Witt rings also arise in studying quadratic forms or symmetric bilinear forms over more general types of rings [5,7, 8, 9]. An interesting problem in the theory is that of classifying Witt rings in case the associated group G is finite. The reduced case, i.e., the case where the nilradical is trivial, is better understood. In particular, the above classification problem is completely solved in this case [4, 12, or 13, Corollary 6.25]. Thus, the emphasis here is on the non-reduced case. Although some of the results given here do not require |G| < ∞, they do require some finiteness assumption. Certainly, the main goal here is to understand the finite case, and in this sense this paper is a continuation of work started by the second author in [13, Chapter 5].