[Minor corrections made, 6/21]
I’d now like to discuss my paper “Categories parametrized by schemes and representation theory in complex rank.” My RSI project was rather-open ended: to investigate the categories of representation theory in complex rank. Pavel Etingof told me that it would be expected that they would behave similar in some ways to the integral case (at least if “there was justice in the world”). For instance, we know that Deligne’s has a comibnatorial parametrization of simple objects similar to the classical case. However, as I discovered when I got there, I don’t actually know representation theory. I had looked through some material on finite groups, and knew (in outline, not usually proofs) the basic facts about the symmetric group. I certainly didn’t know anything about Hecke algebras (the literature of which seems rather inaccessible to beginners), and I don’t think I could define a semisimple Lie algebra. Anyway, so what I did was therefore was the easy case: representation theory in transcendental rank. I sort of ended up stumbling into this by accident, so I’ll try to reconstruct the story below, somewhat. I apologize in advance to readers that know algebraic geometry and will probably find this post rather slow-moving (it’s really addressed with a younger version of myself in mind). Readers may wish, however, to review my earlier posts on this topic.
1. A toy example
To motivate this with something very well-known and elementary, let’s fix and say we are considering a “family
of
-by-
matrices depending polynomially on a parameter
, which is to say the
-th entry of
is a polynomial in
, say with integral coefficients. Then the following conditions are equivalent:
1. The rank of for
transcendental is
2. The rank of for
indeterminate is
3. The rank of is
for almost all integers
Why are they equivalent? This is easy to see. Suppose 2. Put the matrix for
indeterminate in reduced row-echelon form
by row operations in
. Wlog,
(by multiplying by some polynomial) has entries in
. Then
has rank
. The matrix
has rank
whenever the leading terms don’t vanish, which is true for almost all
by the trivial observation that a polynomial in one variable can have only finitely many roots if it is nonzero. Taking into account the row operations used to transform
into
, and whenever the corresponding rational functions used are nonzero, we must have
. So
for almost all
.
So, let’s suppose we are given a “family” of maps for
vector spaces, which depend polynomially on
(in an obvious sense) with coefficients in
(in an appropriate choice of bases). Then if we know that
is injective (resp. surjective) at almost all
(“the classical case,” which may already be known), the same is true in transcendental rank.
2. Categories parametrized by schemes
Ok, so the next step is to note that Deligne’s categories can be viewed as “categories depending on a parameter.” Why is this? Well, let’s look again at the definition of an object in . The object is a pair
, where each
is a finite set and
is an idempotent matrix of recollements. Since composition is given by a law polynomial in
, while recollements don’t depend on
, the
‘s associated prescribed
3. Making it precise
So, around the end of last summer, I showed this to my two mentors, and explained to them how one could deduce interesting results from it. But it doesn’t feel appropriately Bourbakianized. The idea of a “category depending on a parameter” is not very precise, and it’s unclear what we can do with it.
It took a fair bit of soul-searching, but this is the definition used in the paper. Namely, one starts with a ground scheme of parameters, and considers a category internal to the category of
-schemes; for convenience we shall call this an
-category or category over
.
What does this mean? Well, normally, in a (small) category , we have a set
of objects, and a set
of morphisms. There is a map
that sends each morphism to a domain adn codomain, and there is a function called composition
. Here the fibered product is used to indicate that the domain of the second map is the codomain of the first. Similarly, there must be a map
sending each object to the corresponding identity morphism.
This is just the definition of a category, and most readers of this blog probably know it already. Why am I restating it? Because the definition is entirely arrow-theoretic. I’ve talked about “sets” of objects and morphisms, and “functions” on these sets. But this makes sense in any category (where fibered products exist, at least). Instead of an object set, you have an object object (not a typo). You also have a morphism object
in this category, and a morphism
In this way, you can talk about an internal category.
Well, what does all this have to do with families of categories? The point is that an -scheme
(with morphism
) is really a family of schemes
, obtained by taking the fiber.
So, similarly, if we have an -category
(which is the collection of an object-scheme, morphism-scheme, composition-morphism), we can base change by the maps
to get
categories
for each
. What’s more, if we have a
-category for any scheme
, the
-valued points form an actual category . So we can look at
-valued points in
to get from this an actual category
.
However, it’s more convenient to consider algebraically closed fields. The reason is that the -valued points in a
-scheme (say of finite type) are not necessarily dense, but they are if
is algebraically closed; this is essentially a version of the Hilbert Nullstellensatz.
\renewcommand{\b}[1]{\overline{#1}} So, we have to modify what was just said. Given a -category
, we consider it as a family of categories
obtained by base-changing by
and taking
points.
Here is a basic example. Let be a finitely generated commutative algebra over
. (I think commutativity is actually unnecessary, but it’ll make things easier for now.) Then
as a
-algebra is given by generators
and certain relations
between them, where the
are polynomials.
For , consider the algebra
, where
denotes the module where
acts by multiplication by
. An
-dimensional representation of
is the same thing as a choice of
commuting
-by-
matrices
satisfying
. A morphism between two such collections
is an
-by-
matrix
that satisfies
for all
.
These are polynomial conditions in the matrix coefficients of the that depend polynomially on the rank
. In particular, there is a category
over
such that
for
is the category of
-dimensional representations of
. We can do the same for
, for representations of dimension
.
So, that’s all fine, but there is a better example. Deligne’s categories fit into this framework too. There is a category over
whose fibers at
are just the Deligne categories
. This is precisely the meaning of the earlier informal remarks that Deligne’s categories “depend polynomially on
.”
4. Constructibility
So, ok. We have our definition that encapsulates the notion of a family of categories; we need to use this to prove something.
The first part of my paper looks at how the category-theoretic properties of a family of categories arising from a
-category
are actually described by constructible sets, assuming that
is noetherian and all schemes in question are of finite type.
Proposition 1 If
is the morphism-scheme of an
-category
of finite type, and
is noetherian, then there exists a constructible set
whose fibers
correspond to the monomorphisms in
, for all
.
Here is an explanation for why this is true. The property of being a monomorphism in a category is definable via first-order logic. is a monomorphism if whenever
are two morphisms with the same domain and codomain the domain of
, then
implies
.
But the properties in affine space definable by first-order logic are precisely the constructible ones. This is basically Chevalley’s theorem. This is because adding existential quantifiers corresponds to taking projections down to a subset of coordinates. So it is not that surprising that the monomorphisms are constructible. Granted, this doesn’t quite work for arbitrary noetherian schemes, but the principle is the same (and one just uses Chevalley’s theorem).
Let’s look at what this states for the -category
; it states that the monomorphisms are described by a constructible set. But this constructible set can be described directly: it is the set of matrices that are admissible morphisms (i.e. commute with the action of
and have a nonvanishing minor of the right size.
Things are more difficult for Deligne’s category. Well, first of all, it isn’t finite type over . Hence, we construct subcategories
where the sets
are restricted to have cardinality at most
, and
as well. There are only finitely many possibilities for the series
under these restrictions, so we have finite type in this case. In particular, the monomorphisms in this category are described by constructible sets. But it is not clear a priori what they are, since these are not concrete categories.
That proposition was one example. There are others necessary:
Proposition 2 The properties of universality, finte limits and/or colimits, and simplicity are describable by constructible sets under noetherian and finite-type hypotheses.
That’s nice. So here’s an example of how we could use it. Let’s say we have a finite-type -category
, over a noetherian scheme
, with an internal additive structure, and we want to prove that
admits kernels for generic
. If we know that kernels exist for a Zariski dense subset of parameters (e.g., large integers in
), then I claim they exist for
in a dense open subset.
Indeed, there is a constructible set that parametrizes pairs of morphisms
where
is the kernel of
, essentially by the above proposition for limits.
The projection of onto the second factor is surjective when
belongs to teh aforementioned Zariski dense subset, by assumption. In particular, if we consider
, then
is empty for
in a Zariski dense subset. Hence this must be true generically; as a result, kernels exist for generic
.
So, how does this apply to representation theory in complex rank? Well, a lot of properties of representation theory can be stated categorically. For instance, consider the semidirect product ; the simple objects are parametrized by a partition of
and an assignment of a complex number
to each block
. The simple object correspnonding to this is obtained via a well-known “parabolic induction” process.
I claim that the simple objects in have to be obtainable generically by a similar process. The first step is to interpolate this parabolic induction business into complex rank, so that one has objects corresponding to a “partition”
(where
corresponds to a “long top row”) and
that can be viewed as depending polynomially on
. The images of these form a constructible set, and since the fibers of this constructible set contain the fibers of the constructible set
parametrizing simple objects for a Zariski dense subset of parameters, the same holds generically—in particular, for transcendental
.
So, in outline, this is the sort of thing that happens in my paper. The case of semidirect products is a little easier than the first case I investigate, which is the degenerate affine Hecke algebra. This is the technique used, and it provides generic information about representation theory in complex rank.
There is one more part of my paper that I thought I should mention. Remember how Knop introduced categories for
a finite group, but we also have Etingof categories
? I used the same techniques to prove them equivalent (in fact, tensor equivalent—I introduced a tensor structure on the Etingof categories) for transcendental
.
So yeah, that’s about it. The really hard stuff is to see what happens at algebraic . Someone who knows (a lot) more about representation theory than I do should look into it.
June 21, 2010 at 1:42 pm
[…] will resume blogging about more expository (and older) topics, since I have finished talking about my last project. It would be criminal to leave off class field theory right before the Artin reciprocity law, so […]
June 27, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Hello
Do you write your blog posts with the books on hand (e.g. do you write as you read?) Or do you write them after reading them?
June 28, 2010 at 1:18 pm
No, I don’t write my blog posts specifically based on books; I write them after I’ve read the relevant parts of certain books (or other sources) and (at least somewhat) internalized the material. (This particular post, incidentally, is not based on any book…)
March 6, 2012 at 3:21 am
Hi, I saw a macro “\renewcommand{\b}[1]{\overline{#1}}” in the article, maybe when you copy and paste from latex this didn’t work?
I guess this also explains why there are lots of funny underlines (which are supposed to be overlines) here.