Completing perfect complexes. With appendices by Tobias Barthel and Bernhard Keller (Q2205606): Difference between revisions

The author introduces the notion of sequential completion of a category, which is the categorical analogue of the construction of the real numbers from the rationals via Cauchy sequences. The author gives conditions under which the completion of an abelian (resp. triangulated) category is again abelian (resp. triangulated) and shows that the theories of completion of abelian categories and derived categories are compatible to one another. The paper contains numerous explicit examples of completions of categories. For a noetherian algebra \(\Lambda\) over a complete local ring, it is shown that the completion of the category of finite length \(\Lambda\)-modules identifies with the category of artinian \(\Lambda\)-modules. The completion of the category of perfect complexes over a right coherent ring identifies with the bouded derived category of finitely presented modules. This holds for non-affine noetherian schemes as well and one can use this to give a direct construction of the singularity category. This paper contains three appendices. ``The first one by Tobias Barthel discusses the completion of perfect complexes for ring spectra''. ``The second one by Tobias Barthel and Henning Krause refines for a separated noetherian scheme the description of the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves as a completion. It is shown that the objects are precisely the colimits of Cauchy sequences of perfect complexes that satisfy an intrinsic boundeness condition. In the final appendix, Bernard Keller introduces the notion of a morphic enhancement of a triangulated category and provides a foundation for completing a triangulated category.''