DEFORMATION THEORY OF THE CHOW GROUP OF ZERO CYCLES

We study the deformations of the Chow group of zerocycles of the special fibre of a smooth scheme over a Henselian discrete valuation ring. Our main tools are Bloch's formula and differential forms. As a corollary we get an algebraization theorem for thickened zero cycles previously obtained using idelic techniques. In the course of the proof we develop moving lemmata and Lefschetz theorems for cohomology groups with coefficients in differential forms.