This post is part of a series on the Sullivan conjecture in algebraic topology. The Sullivan conjecture is a topological result, which remarkably reduces — as H. Miller showed — to a purely algebraic computation in the category of unstable modules (and eventually algebras) over the Steenrod algebra, and in particular an injectivity assertion. This is a rather formidable category, but work of Kuhn enables one to identify a quotient category of it with the category of “generic representations” of the general linear group, which can be studied using different (and often easier) means. Kuhn’s work provides an approach to proving much of the algebraic background that goes into the Sullivan conjecture. In this post, I’ll describe one of the important ingredients.
The Gabriel-Popsecu theorem is a structure theorem for Grothendieck abelian categories, a version of which will be useful in understanding the structure of the category of unstable modules over the Steenrod algebra. The purpose of this post is to discuss this result and its many-object version due to Kuhn, from the paper “Generic Representations of the Finite General Linear Groups and the Steenrod Algebra: I.” Although the proof consists mostly of a series of diagram chases, there are some subtleties that I found rather difficult to grasp, and I thought it would be worthwhile to go through it in detail here.
1. Grothendieck abelian categories
Let be an abelian category. Then
is Grothendieck abelian if
has a generator: that is, there is an object
such that every object in
can be built up from colimits starting with
. (More precisely, the smallest subcategory of
, closed under colimits, that contains
is
itself)
- Filtered colimits in
exist and are exact.
Many categories occurring in “nature” (e.g., categories of modules over a ring of sheaves on a site) are Grothendieck, and it is thus useful to have general results about them. The goal of this post is to describe a useful structure theorem for Grothendieck abelian categories, which will show that they are the quotients of categories of modules by Serre subcategories.
One can give a simple categorical condition on in order for it to be equivalent to a category of modules over a ring. This is essentially Morita theory, and is as follows:
Theorem 17 Suppose
has a compact, projective generator
, and let
. Then the functor
is an equivalence of categories.
In particular, Morita theory states that what distinguishes categories of modules over a ring is the existence of a compact, projective generator.
If is no longer compact and projective, one can still say something. It turns out that
will be expressed as the localization of right
-modules by a Serre subcategory. In particular, any Grothendieck abelian category can be expressed in this way.
Theorem 18 (Gabriel-Popescu) Let
be a generator for
and let
as before. There is an adjunction:
such that:
- The functor
is exact.
- The right adjoint
is fully faithful (that is,
is a localization of
).
If
is the (Serre) subcategory killed by
, then there is induced an equivalence
2. The first step in the proof
The existence of the functor follows from the adjoint functor theorem. More explicitly, given a right
-module
, the functor
is a right-exact, additive functor with the property that . So to compute
, choose a free presentation
and define to be the cokernel of
.
Our first goal is now to check that is fully faithful, which is equivalent to the condition that for any
,
be an isomorphism. In fact, most of the argument is quite general. One of the key steps in this process is that is an abelian category, which means that to check that a map is an isomorphism, then it suffices to show that it is a monomorphism and an epimorphism.
For convenience, denote:
for the two adjoint functors that enter.
We will start by proving:
Proposition 19 Let
be a morphism in
for some
. If
is injective, then its adjoint
is also a monomorphism.
Proof: The condition of the proposition (that , adjoint to
, be a monomorphism of modules) implies that if
is any morphism in the image of
, then the composite
is zero only if
is zero. The condition “in the image of ” is the snag, and the point of the proof is to get around it.
To prove that is a monomorphism, we may choose an epimorphism
in
, and show that the map
is an isomorphism.
For , we can choose a free
-module
and a surjection
. We can take
to be
, so that we need to prove that
Since filtered colimits are exact, it suffices to prove the result with replaced by a finite subset thereof (although we may lose the epimorphism property).
So we may reduce to proving:
Lemma 20 Let
be as above. Let
be a finite free
-module and let
be a map of
-modules. Then
To prove this lemma in turn, it suffices to prove that if
is any morphism in , then
is zero if and only if
is zero. (We can do this because
generates
.) However, we observe that any map
is in the image of
, and
is in the image of
. We have already seen that, by adjointness, if
is any map in the image of
, then
is zero if and only if
is zero. This completes the proof.
Using this, we will show that is fully faithful.
Proposition 21 The functor
is fully faithful.
Proof: To see that is fully faithful, it suffices by a diagram chase to show that
is an isomorphism for any . It is “formal” that
is an epimorphism. In fact, the claim that
is an epimorphism for every
is equivalent to the faithfulness of
. But if
is any morphism in
and
is zero, then is zero as
generates
.
To see that is a monomorphism, we appeal to the preceding lemma and note that the adjoint map is the identity
, which is evidently a monomorphism.
3. Completion of the proof
The final step is to show that is an exact functor — it is already right exact as a left adjoint. Since
has enough projectives, we can talk about the the left derived functors of
, and it suffices to show that they vanish. For this, in turn, it suffices to show that if
is an inclusion of modules, with free, then
is a monomorphism in . Using a filtered colimit argument, we can even reduce to the case of
finitely generated.
But in this case, the map can be identified with a map
for some finite index set
. The above lemma shows that the adjoint map
is a monomorphism, which completes the proof. This in particular proves the Gabriel-Popescu theorem.
The Gabriel-Popescu theorem has another interpretation. Let be as above and let
be the full subcategory spanned by
. Then
and
are categories enriched over abelian groups, and the second statement is equivalent to saying that
exhibits the identity functor as a left Kan extension. This is equivalent to the condition that any element of
can be built up as a “canonical colimit” of elements of
, or the fact that
is an isomorphism for all . We knew at the beginning that every object of
could be obtained form
using colimits; this condition states that it can be done so in a canonical way.
Corollary 22 If
is injective, then so is
in
-modules.
This is a formal argument: a right adjoint whose left adjoint is exact preserves injectives.
4. Kuhn’s many-object variant
The purpose of this section is to explain a many-object version of the Gabriel-Popescu theorem due to Kuhn. Suppose is Grothendieck abelian and
is a collection of objects which generates
under colimits. It is possible but technically inconvenient to give
a single generator by taking the direct sum of everything in
.
Kuhn’s idea is to generalize the Gabriel-Popescu theorem in the following manner. A ring is the same thing as a category enriched in abelian groups, containing only one object. A module over that ring is an enriched functor from that category to abelian groups. Hence:
Definition 23 We define the category
to be the category of (additively) enriched functors
Given a single object , we got an adjunction between right
-modules (for
) and
itself. The many-object analog is the right adjoint
which is really the Yoneda functor: it sends an object to the representation
. The adjoint functor theorem gives a left adjoint
which sends a representation to the functor tensor product (see for instance this MO post)
where is the identity functor.
Now, one has:
Theorem 24 (Kuhn) The adjunction
has the following properties:
is exact.
is fully faithful.
In particular,
is a localization of
by a Serre subcategory.
The proof of Kuhn’s theorem is a generalization of the proof of the Gabriel-Popescu theorem. The key idea is to replace “free modules” with representable functors. For any , there is a representation
given by
The Yoneda lemma shows that these are projective objects in , and
maps under the functor
to
itself. (In fact, this is one way to describe the functor tensor product.) One can now run more or less the above proof, noting that
is fully faithful on these representable objects
.
Leave a Reply