Two lives: Compositions of unimodular rows

Abstract

The paper lays the foundation for the study of unimodular rows using Spin groups. We show that elementary orbits of unimodular rows (of any length n≥3) are equivalent to elementary Spin orbits on the unit sphere. (This bijection is proved over all commutative rings.) In the special case n=3, this leads to an interpretation of the Vaserstein symbol using Spin groups.In addition, we introduce a new composition law that operates on certain subspaces of the underlying quadratic space (using the multiplication in composition algebras). In particular, the special case of split-quaternions leads to the composition of unimodular rows (discovered by L. Vaserstein and later generalized by W. van der Kallen). Strikingly, with this approach, we now see the possibility of new orbit structures not only for unimodular rows (using octonion multiplication) but also for more general quadratic spaces.