Derived, coderived, and contraderived categories of locally presentable abelian categories (Q2664598): Difference between revisions

This article addresses the foundational theory of the unbounded derived category \(D(A)\) of an abelian category \(A\), exploring its definitions and properties in more general contexts than the classical cases. Unlike the more usual case of bounded derived categories (or even just bounded below or above), where one can use model structures of complexes of projective or injective objects, unbounded derived categories pose many problems; the analogous categories of unbounded complexes of projective/injective objects do not give the right answer. To address this, there have been many different approaches to defining \(D(A)\), which this article recapitulates in the Introduction. They mostly fall within two camps: one can either define them as categorical quotients of the homotopy category, constructions which appeared in the first named author's previous work as derived categories of the \emph{first or second kind}, or instead work with set-theoretic techniques of model structures, which is the approach developed in this paper. Sections 1--5 are devoted to exposition of the technical tools of model category theory for abelian categories. Two of the classes of categories \(A\) that this paper looks at, in particular, are \emph{Grothendieck abelian categories} (which have `enough injective complexes of injective objects) and \emph{locally presentable categories with enough projective objects}. The former case is more usual in the literature; there is a corresponding `coderived' category that can be described using an injective model structure, and is generated by some object. Part of this article is devoted to showing how the latter case is in some sense dual to the more usual case of Grothendieck categories, defining some `contraderived category' using a projective model strucutre and proving an analogous well-generation result. The study of these model categories for these two `dual' classes of abelian categories is done in Sections 6--9. The last part (Section 10) of this paper deals with a different question, phrased in the `quotient category' description of derived categories. The authors consider categories \(E\) that might not have enough injectives or projectives; one can still define its derived category \(D(E)\) as a Verdier quotient. Using set-theoreric tools, and assuming \(E\) has an `object size function', the authors then show that this category has Hom sets (instead of proper classes). Of particular remark in this paper is the care with which the authors relate their nomenclature and definitions to the ones already existing in the literature, which is always useful in a field so full of technicalities and slightly different frameworks; for example, Remark 9.2 explains what the `co-/contraderived categories' have to do with other names and definitions appearing in the literature.