Cycle conjectures and birational invariants over finite fields

Abstract: We study a natural birational invariant for varieties over finite fields and show that its vanishing on projective space is equivalent to the Tate conjecture, the Beilinson conjecture, and the Grothendieck--Serre semi-simplicity conjecture for all smooth projective varieties over finite fields. We further show that the Tate, Beilinson, and 1-semi-simplicity conjecture in half of the degrees implies those conjectures in all degrees.