We give counterexamples to the degeneration of the Hochschild-Kostant-Rosenberg spectral sequence in characteristic p, both in the untwisted and twisted settings. We also prove that the de Rham-HP and crystalline-TP spectral sequences need not degenerate.

We give the first examples of derived equivalences between varieties defined over non-closed fields where one has a rational point and the other does not. We begin with torsors over Jacobians of curves over $\mathbb {Q}$ and $\mathbb {F}_q(t)$, and conclude with a pair of hyperkähler 4-folds over $\mathbb {Q}$. The latter is independently interesting as a new example of a transcendental Brauer–Manin obstruction to the Hasse principle. The source code for the various computations is supplied as supplementary material with the online version of this article.

We use Godeaux–Serre varieties of finite groups, projective representation theory, the twisted Atiyah–Segal completion theorem, and our previous work on the topological period-index problem to compute the étale index of Brauer classes α ∈ Brét(X) in some specific examples. In particular, these computations show that the étale index of α differs from the period of α in general. As an application, we compute the index of unramified classes in the function fields of high-dimensional Godeaux–Serre varieties in terms of projective representation theory.

Let U be a connected noetherian scheme of finite étale cohomological dimension in which every finite set of points is contained in an affine open subscheme. Suppose that α is a class in H2(Uét,ℂm)tors. For each positive integer m, the K-theory of α-twisted sheaves is used to identify obstructions to α being representable by an Azumaya algebra of rank m2. The étale index of α, denoted eti(α), is the least positive integer such that all the obstructions vanish. Let per(α) be the order of α in H2(Uét,ℂm)tors. Methods from stable homotopy theory give an upper bound on the étale index that depends on the period of α and the étale cohomological dimension of U; this bound is expressed in terms of the exponents of the stable homotopy groups of spheres and the exponents of the stable homotopy groups of B(ℤ/(per(α))). As a corollary, if U is the spectrum of a field of finite cohomological dimension d, then , where [] is the integer part of , whenever per(α) is divided neither by the characteristic of k nor by any primes that are small relative to d.