Birational Motivic Homotopy Theories and the Slice Filtration

Abstract: This paper is part of an endeavor to define an analogue of the slice filtration in the unstable motivic homotopy category. Our approach was inspired by the fact that the triangulated structures do not play a relevant role for the construction of birational homotopy categories as well as by the work of Kahn-Sujatha \cite{K-theory/0596} on birational motives, where the existence of a connection between the layers of the slice filtration and birational invariants is explicitly suggested. Our main result, shows that there is an equivalence of categories between the orthogonal components for the slice filtration and the birational motivic stable homotopy categories which are constructed in this paper. Relying on this equivalence, we are able to describe the slices for projective spaces (including $\mathbb P ^{\infty}$), Thom spaces and blow ups.