Noncrossed products in Witt's Theorem

Since Amitsur's discovery of noncrossed product division algebras more than 35 years ago, their existence over more familiar fields has been an object of investigation. Brussel's work was a culmination of this effort, exhibiting noncrossed products over the rational function field k(t) and the Laurent series field k((t)) over any global field k -- the smallest possible centers of noncrossed products. Witt's theorem gives a transparent description of the Brauer group of k((t)) as the direct sum of the Brauer group of k and the character group of the absolute Galois group of k. We classify the Brauer classes over k((t)) containing noncrossed products by analyzing the fiber over chi for each character chi in Witt's theorem. In this way, a picture of the partition of the Brauer group into crossed products/noncrossed products is obtained, which is in principle ruled solely by a relation between index and number of roots of unity. For large indices the noncrossed products occur with a "natural density" equal to 1.