Let be an abelian category with enough projectives. In the previous post, we described the definition of the derived
-category
of
. As a simplicial category, this consisted of bounded-below complexes of projectives, and the space of morphisms between two complexes
was obtained by taking the chain complex of maps
between
and turning that into a space (by truncation
and the Dold-Kan correspondence).
Last time, we proved most of the following result:
Theorem 5
is a stable
-category whose suspension functor is given by shifting by
.
has a
-structure whose heart is
, and the homotopy category of
is the usual derived category.
Note for instance that this means that sits as a full subcategory inside
: that is, there is a full subcategory
(the “heart”) of
(spanned by those complexes homologically concentrated in degree zero).
This heart has the property that the mapping spaces in are discrete, and the functor
restricts to an equivalence ; one can prove this by examining the chain complex of maps between two complexes homologically concentrated in degree zero. The inverse to this equivalence runs
, and it sends an element of
to a projective resolution. This is functorial in the
-categorical sense.
Most of the above theorem is exactly the same as the description of the ordinary derived category of (i.e., the homotopy category of
), The goal of this post is to describe what’s special to the
-categorical setting: that there is a universal property. I will start with the universal property for the subcategory
.
Theorem 6
is the
-category obtained from
(the projective objects) by freely adding geometric realizations.
The purpose of this post is to sketch a proof of the above theorem, and to explain what it means.
1. Freely adding colimits
Let be an ordinary category, and
a cocomplete category. Let
be the category of presheaves on
. Then it is a classical fact that we have an equivalence of categories
that is, to give a functor is equivalent to giving a colimit-preserving (equivalently, left adjoint) functor
. In other words,
is the free cocompletion of
, obtained by adding all colimits freely. The Yoneda embedding
is the universal imbedding of into a cocomplete category.
There is an analogous result in the -categorical setting. Let
be an
-category. We can define the analogous
-category
where is the
-category of spaces. Then, if
is any cocomplete
-category, there is an equivalence of
-categories,
between functors and colimit-preserving functors
.
We will need a variant of the above construction, when we freely add only some colimits rather than all of them. For simplicity, we state the next result for geometric realizations.
Proposition 7 Let
be an
-category. Then there exists an
-category
admitting geometric realizations, together with an inclusion
with the property that for any
-category
admitting geometric realizations, we have an equivalence
between functors
and functors
that preserve geometric realizations.
The strategy is to start by taking to be the smallest sub
-category of
which contains the image of the Yoneda imbedding
and which is closed under taking geometric realizations. Then, clearly
contains
; to complete the proof, one has to show that a functor
is a left Kan extension of its restriction to if and only if it preserves geometric realizations. (“Kan extension” seems to be one of the magic words one has to throw around in this business, to make the proofs work efficiently.) In fact, one has an equivalence between functors
and left Kan extensions
, provided that left Kan extensions exist.
So let’s prove this precisely:
- A functor
admits a left Kan extension (if
admits geometric realizations).
- A functor
is a left Kan extension of its restriction to
precisely if it preserves geometric realizations.
How can we prove this? The strategy, for 1, to show that the left Kan extension exists, is to note that it would exist perfectly well if we knew was cocomplete. But we can find a colimit-preserving imbedding
into a cocomplete -category
(for instance, the opposite to the Yoneda imbedding), and any functor
admits a left Kan extension to
. But, since
is generated under geometric realizations from
, one can then check that
is contained (up to isomorphism) in
itself. This means that the left Kan extension exists, and in fact is a special case of a left Kan extension
In particular, we’ve established the first step. Observe that the Kan extension constructed in this way preserves geometric realizations, because the functor was constructed so as to preserve colimits. (This is part of the yoga of the Yoneda lemma: Yoneda extensions are left Kan extensions, and preserve colimits.)
Now we need to establish the second step. That is, if is any functor preserving geometric realizations, then it is a left Kan extension of its restriction to
. We can do this by observing that a left Kan extension of its restriction exists, by the previous step, and said left Kan extension preserves geometric realizations.
I’ve sort of sketched this business; it’s in 5.3 of “Higher Topos Theory.” I’m not sure how much going into these details would be relevant to a blog setting.
Definition 8 Given an
-category
, we let
be the
-category obtained by freely adding geometric realizations, as above.
2. Proof of the universal property
With the general formalism done, we can turn to the main goal, which was to say that was obtained by adding geometric realizations to the
-category (even ordinary category) of projectives
.
How might we prove this? Roughly, the intuition is that consists of nonnegatively graded chain complexes with elements in
and these are obtained from simplicial objects by Dold-Kan.
To make it precise, let’s first construct a functor. One can show that admits geometric realizations. Let’s accept this—the idea is that it certainly admits finite colimits (being stable) but taking higher and higher stages of a geometric realization only affect the “tail end” (the connectivity increases), so
turns out to have geometric realizations. (This is a “left completeness” condition.)
Anyway, there is certainly an imbedding
and since the latter -category admits geometric realizations, we get a geometric-realization-preserving functor
which we have to prove is an equivalence.
To prove that is an equivalence, we have to show that
is fully faithful and essentially surjective. Let’s start with full faithfulness. Certainly
is fully faithful—
is a full subcategory of
.
Proposition 9
is fully faithful.
Proof: Let’s start by settling a special case of full faithfulness.
Given an object , we can ask for the collection of
such that
is an equivalence. As we’ve seen, this contains all . The idea is that
is a “projective” object, so this collection of
will be stable under geometric realizations, and thus contain all of
. If we can prove it, then we will be done with full faithfulness: in fact, the collection of all
for which
is an equivalence (for all ) is closed under geometric realizations.
Why is this collection of objects stable? We have to show that the functors into spaces
and
commute with geometric realizations. In
(which is contained in a presheaf category), that’s a special case of the Yoneda principle: homming out of a representable functor commutes with colimits in the presheaf category (e.g., geometric realizations), because homming out of a representable functor is equivalently evaluation. In the case of
, it is a little more subtle.
The point is that is concentrated in degree zero: it is the complex with some (projective)
in degree zero and zero elsewhere. Given a complex
, we have that the internal (chain complex) homs are given by
Consider now a simplicial object in
. For simplicity, assume that it is a simplicial object in the 1-category of chain complexes (i.e., on the nose, not up to coherent homotopy); this can always be arranged suitably, possibly by changing the category up to equivalence. So
is really a simplicial chain complex, or a double chain complex
. The geometric realization, spaces or chain complexes, corresponds to taking the total complex. But this is all preserved under taking
.
The above proof was somewhat handwavy. One key point near the end is that the functor from nonnegatively graded chain complexes (i.e., simplicial abelian groups) to spaces preserves geometric realizations. This is an illustration of the fact that simplicial abelian groups are monadic over spaces.
Anyway, the point of the above argument is that we get a fully faithful functor
and the last thing to check is that it is essentially surjective. But this is the Dold-Kan correspondence. Given an object in , it is a chain complex of projectives. Dold-Kan allows us to say that it corresponds to a simplicial object in
, and in fact the object is a geometric realization of that simplicial object. So
is generated under geometric realizations by
, which means that
is essentially surjective, and hence an equivalence.
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