Anand Sawant

Standard norm varieties played a crucial role in Voevodsky’s proof of the Bloch-Kato conjecture.  I will discuss various near-rationality concepts for smooth projective varieties and describe known near-rationality results for standard norm varieties after introducing them.  I will then outline an argument showing that a standard norm variety over a field of characteristic 0 is geometrically universally R-trivial.  The talk is based on joint work with Chetan Balwe and Amit Hogadi.