The Allison–Faulkner construction of

Abstract

Abstract We show that the Tits index $E_{8,1}^{133}$ cannot be obtained by means of the Tits construction over a field with no odd degree extensions. The proof uses a general method coming from the theory of symmetric spaces. We construct two cohomological invariants, in degrees $6$ and $8$ , of the Tits construction and the more symmetric Allison–Faulkner construction of Lie algebras of type $E_8$ and show that these invariants can be used to detect the isotropy rank.