Refinements to patching and applications to field invariants

Abstract: We introduce a notion of refinements in the context of patching, in order to obtain new results about local-global principles and field invariants in the context of quadratic forms and central simple algebras. The fields we consider are finite extensions of the fraction fields of two-dimensional complete domains that need not be local. Our results in particular give the u-invariant and period-index bound for these fields, as consequences of more general abstract results.