Essential dimension of involutions and subalgebras

Essential dimension is an invariant of algebraic groups G over a field F that measures the complexity of G-torsors over field extensions of F. We use theorems of N. Karpenko about the incompressibility of Severi-Brauer varieties and quadratic Weil transfers of Severi-Brauer varieties to compute the essential dimension of some closed subgroups of R _K/F (GL ₁(A)), where A is a central division K-algebra of prime power degree and K/F is a separable field extension of degree ≤ 2. In particular, we determine the essential dimension of the group Sim(A, σ) of similitudes of (A, σ), where σ is an F-involution on A, and the essential dimension of the normalizer $N_{GL_1 (A)} left( {GL_1 left( B right)} right)$ , where B is a separable subalgebra of A.