Let’s try to do some (baby) examples of the Adams spectral sequence. The notation used will be that of yesterday’s post.
1.
So let’s start with a silly example, where the answer is tautological: . We could try to compute the homotopy groups of this using the Adams spectral sequence. At a prime
, this means that we should get the
-adic completion
in degree zero, and nothing elsewhere.
It turns out that we can write down a very explicit Adams resolution for . To start with, we need a map
where
is a wedge of
and shifts, and such that
is a monomorphism on
-homology. We can take the map
the fact that is a monomorphism on
-homology follows because
is an epimorphism on
-cohomology, by Serre’s computation of the cohomology of Eilenberg-MacLane spaces. Serre’s computation tells us, in fact, that the cohomology of
is the Steenrod algebra mod the ideal generated by the Bockstein.
The fiber of is
again, and we can repeat this process. So we have an Adams resolution for
which looks like
Each of the cofibers is , and the
-page of the spectral sequence
is
for
and zero otherwise.
I didn’t go completely over the degree conventions for the ASS in the previous post, so let me discuss it here: if is the
th cofiber in the Adams resolution, then
Anyway, this spectral sequence completely degenerates at , and all we have is a line of
‘s along the line
. This corresponds to the associated graded of the
-adic filtration of the group
, and we recover what we expected.
2. The sphere
Let’s now consider a much more interesting example of the ASS, the case of the sphere. The cohomology of the sphere is in degree zero, which means that the ASS for the sphere looks like
where denotes
-adic completion. In practice, we know that the stable homotopy groups of spheres (other than the one in degree zero) are all finite, so
-adic completion just means taking the
-part.
Let me note a few features of this:
- The differential in the
th stage goes
.
- The
means that
is what affects the
(i.e.
corresponds to extensions). The
is carried along from the grading of the Steenrod algebra, though.
- We can compute all these things either in the category of modules over
or comodules over
.
- There is a multiplicative structure on this spectral sequence which corresponds to the smash (or composition) product on the stable homotopy groups of spheres. With respect to this, one actually has a spectral sequence of algebras converging to the graded ring
.
Computing the page is not easy, but it can (theoretically at least) be done reasonably mechanically by writing down minimal resolutions. Unfortunately, the differentials are not so mechanical! Still, let’s try to see what we can do.
Let’s take . We can at least describe the
groups when
. When
, it is sort of silly: there is a
when
and zero elsewhere. When
, we start by writing down a very small piece of a resolution of
over
.
The idea is that is sending the generator to the nonzero element of
, of course. The idea of the second map is that the kernel of
is generated by the indecomposable elements in
, which are given by the
for
. So this defines the second map.
Now we’ve written down a very small piece of a minimal resolution for over
. Since the resolution is minimal, we can compute the
groups by literally just taking
‘s into
—there’s no homology to compute. We find:
Proposition 1 The groups
are
, generated by an element
. The groups
are otherwise zero.
3. The differentials and the Hopf invariant problem
Next, I’d like to describe what this has to do with the Hopf invariant one problem. One way of phrasing (a variant of) the Hopf invariant one problem is when there exists a map of spectra (i.e., a stable map)
such that the cofiber is such that its cohomology
is a nontrivial extension of
by
as
-modules. In other words, if one starts with the generator in degree zero of the cofiber
, applying a suitable Steenrod square
gets you to a nonzero element in degree
.
If this happens, has to be a power of
. For otherwise
is decomposable and applying it cannot take the nonzero element in degree zero to the nonzero element in degree
. Alternatively, we’ve computed above that
is zero when
for some
.
With these preliminaries out of the way, let’s try to connect the existence of such a map with the question whether the are infinite cycles. Here is the answer:
Proposition 2 The element
is an infinite cycle in the ASS if and only if there exists a map
such that
is nontrivial on the cofiber.
In fact, suppose is an infinite cycle in the ASS. Then, in particular,
corresponds to an actual map
; the claim is that this has Hopf invariant one. To see this, let’s unwind the definitions. We can begin an Adams resolution for
and lifts to a map
because it is zero in homology. However, if
is represented by something which comes from a nonzero element in row
, it can’t be lifted any higher in the Adams resolution: that is,
induces a nonzero map on homology from
Anyway, we can now draw a commutative diagram of cofiber sequences
By assumption, is nonzero on homology, so using the diagram of long exact sequences, we find that the map
has trivial kernel in homology. In particular, the map
is surjective, which is saying that has Hopf invariant one. This argument can be entirely reversed: if one has a map of Hopf invariant one, one gets an infinite cycle in the ASS in the right degree that it must be
.
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