Descent in triangulated categories (Q422377): Difference between revisions

This paper discusses effective descent in the context of triangulated categories. The author provides necessary and sufficient conditions for descent to be effective for idempotent-complete triangulated categories. Before stating these results, we recall as background the well-known fact that, for the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves on a non-affine scheme, Zariski descent fails. This is because a morphism may be trivial on a Zariski open cover, and yet globally non-trivial: take for example the boundary morphism in the category corresponding to a non-split short exact sequence of vector bundles. In other words, descent fails because the derived pullback to a Zariski open cover is not faithful. We see therefore that some faithfulness assumption is necessary for effective descent. The author demonstrates that for ring objects in triangulated categories, a suitable faithfulness assumption is in fact both necessary and sufficient for effective descent. To be precise, we take an idempotent-complete triangulated category \(\mathcal{C}\) equipped with a monoidal functor \(\otimes\), and a ring object \(A\) in \(\mathcal{C}\) (by definition this is an object \(A\) with a multiplication map \(A \otimes A \to A\) and a notion of a unit, satisfying suitable compatibilities). The result is then that \(A\) satisfies effective descent if and only if \(A\) is faithful (Corollary 3.1). To give some feeling for the terms in this result, and provide motivation, we recall the crucial example of descent for a morphism of commutative rings \(R \to A\). In this case \(A\) is naturally a ring object in the category \(\mathcal{C}\) of \(R\)-modules. The descent problem is to determine whether \(\mathcal{C}\) is equivalent to the category of \(A\)-modules suitably equipped with descent data, via extension of scalars \(A \otimes_R -\). If this equivalence holds, we say that the morphism `satisfies effective descent'. The theorem in the previous paragraph shows that \(R \to A\) satisfies effective descent if and only if \(A\) is a faithful \(R\)-module. Notably this theorem places no commutativity condition on the ring object, so the commutativity assumption in the previous paragraph is unnecessary. This is elucidated in the article by noting that the ring objects discussed should in fact be viewed as examples of monads, and that the theorem above is a corollary of a more general theorem in this setting, which we state next. Specifically, for a ring object \(A\) we consider the monad given by the endofunctor \(A \otimes_R -\) of \(\mathcal{C}\): the \(R\)-module structure on \(A\) is encoded in the monad structure. In the monad setting, the author shows that a faithful additive monad \(M\) (on an idempotent-complete triangulated category \(\mathcal{C}\)) satisfies effective descent if and only if \(M\) detects semi-simplicity, in the sense that a morphism in \(\mathcal{C}\) is semi-simple if its image under \(M\) also enjoys this property (Theorem 2.23). Note that in an idempotent-complete triangulated category, semi-simplicity of a morphism is equivalent to that morphism possessing a kernel. The author also shows that the condition that \(M\) detects semi-simplicity may be replaced by the analogous condition on \(F_M\), the free \(M\)-module functor. To complete the picture, the author presents an elementary example of a faithful monad on a suitable category \(\mathcal{C}\) which does not satisfy descent. The category \(\mathcal{C}\) is the derived category of finitely-generated modules over the path algebra of the \(A_2\)-quiver: the monad is shown not to detect semi-simplicity in the sense above. An expository appendix is supplied, giving definitions for monads, modules over them, and the Eilenberg-Moore adjunction between the free module functor and forgetful functor. The dual notions for comonads are also explicitly described.