Today, I will discuss the proof of a technical lemma in Hartshorne on sheaf cohomology, which he uses to prove Grothendieck’s vanishing theorem by reducing to finitely generated sheaves.
Prerequisite: Some familiarity with the Grothendieck spectral sequence. I’m probably going to blog about this (and spectral sequences more generally) soon, though I need to polish what I have written so far. Note that this has already been blogged about over at A Mind for Madness.
Proposition 1 Let
be a noetherian topological space, and
an inductive system of abelian groups on
. Then
for each
.
The idea is to use the Grothendieck spectral sequence. First, consider the abelian category of
-indexed inductive systems of sheaves on
. This is a functor category of
(a poset is a category!) in an abelian category (namely, the category of sheaves) so
is an abelian category. Then the maps
are functors on this category. We first study the first functor.
Let be the functor
sending
and
the global section functor. For the first functor
(i.e. direct limit, then cohomology), we are looking at the composites
.
Lemma 2 The category
has enough injectives.
Indeed, we shall obtain a generator for . Let
be a generator for
–for instance, a suitable sum of constant sheaves over open subsets of
. For
, let
be the diagram scheme containing
in the
spot and
everywhere else. To hom out of
into another diagram scheme is the same as homming from
into the
-th spot into the other diagram scheme. From this it is easy to see that
is a generator for
.
Moreover, since satisfies the condition (A) of the previous post, it follows that
does (the condition (A) is preserved under functor categories, as remarked there). So by the theorem of the previous post,
admits enough injectives.
We now want to apply the Grothendieck spectral sequence to . It needs to be checked first that
maps injectives in
to
-acyclic objects. Any injective object in
must be a diagram consisting only of injective sheaves; this follows by testing exactness when homming out of diagram schemes containing precisely one object, and is a straightforward exercise.
Now we have
Lemma 3 The direct limit of flasque sheaves on a noetherian space is flasque.
Since (cf. Hartshorne) every injective is flasque, it follows that direct limits (i.e. ) maps injective objects in
into flasque (hence acyclic) sheaves. So the lemma will allow us to apply the Grothendieck spectral sequence.
The lemma, in turn, is a direct corollary of the fact that on a noetherian space. This is an exercise in Hartshorne II.1. In fact, if
is surjective whenever
, it follows by taking inductive limits and using the above fact that
is surjective, since inductive limits of abelian groups preserve surjectivity.
So, anyway, it is now clear that we can apply the Grothendieck spectral sequence to . There is a spectral sequence
. We have used the fact that
, which is just a restatement of the fact stated above that taking sections and direct limits are operators that commute for sheaves on a noetherian space. (This is a slight abuse of notation, since for instance
is used to refer to direct limits both of sheaves and of abelian groups.)
But the above fact about inductive limits of sheaves implies that inductive limits of sheaves form an exact functor, in particular the higher derived functors of are zero. So we find that this spectral sequence degenerates and
.
Now, let’s use the spectral sequence for . On the category of inductive systems of abelian groups, the inductive limit is an exact functor (so any object is acyclic with respect to this functor). So
is exact and its higher derived functors are zero. In particular, the Grothendieck spectral sequence
exists and degenerates. We find that
But , so
. It now follows that
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