Motivic Homotopy Groups of Spheres and Free Summands of Stably Free Modules

Abstract

Working over an algebraically closed field $k$ of characteristic $0$, we show that the motivic stable homotopy groups of the sphere spectrum can be determined entirely from the motivic homotopy groups of the $p$-completed sphere spectra and the motivic cohomology of the ground field, except possibly for the $0$ and $-1$-stems. Using this, we show that the complex realization maps from the motivic homotopy groups to the classical stable homotopy groups are isomorphisms in a range of bidegrees. We apply this to deduce that complex realization also induces isomorphisms on unstable homotopy groups for Stiefel varieties $V_r(\mathbb{A}^n_k)$ in a range of bidegrees. We use this to determine when the projection map $V_r(\mathbb{A}^n_k) \to V_1(\mathbb{A}^n_k)$ admits a right inverse, settling the question of when the universal stably-free module of type $(n,n-1)$ admits a free summand of given rank.