Paper detail

Étale homotopy groups of algebraic groups and homogeneous spaces

We show the vanishing of the second homotopy group of the étale homotopy type of a smooth connected algebraic group over a separably closed field, completed away from the characteristic. This is an algebraic analogue of a classical theorem of Elie Cartan. Based on this result, we establish an explicit formula for the similarly completed second homotopy group of a homogeneous space.