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On flat pullbacks for Chow groups

It is a fundamental property of the Chow groups of algebraic schemes that they are contra-functorial with respect to flat morphisms between schemes. While the pullback homomorphism is easy to define at the level of algebraic cycles, the crucial step is to show that the pullback of cycles preserves rational equivalence, so that it descends to the Chow groups. The purpose of this note is to give a natural sheaf theoretic proof of the preservation of rational equivalence under flat pullback on cycles.