Good moduli spaces for Artin stacks (Q2511506)

This paper, which consists of part of the author's PhD thesis, is concerned with the construction of moduli spaces for Artin stacks, generalising Mumford's GIT construction of quotients. A key definition is that of a good moduli space, which generalises the notions of a good GIT quotient and a tame stack. The definition is very simple: a good moduli space is a quasi-compact morphism \(\phi:{\mathcal X}\to Y\) from an Artin stack to an algebraic space such that the push-forward functor on quasi-coherent sheaves is exact and the induced morphism of sheaves \({\mathcal O}_Y\to\phi_*{\mathcal O}_X\) is an isomorphism. The main properties of good moduli spaces (quite similar to those of good quotients) are described in Theorem 4.16, following some preliminary material on notations and cohomologically affine morphisms in Sections 2 and 3. Conditions for an étale morphism of stacks to descend to an étale morphism of good moduli spaces are described in Theorem 5.1. This is applied in section 6 to prove that a good moduli space \(\phi:{\mathcal X}\to Y\) for a locally noetherian Artin stack \({\mathcal X}\) is universal for maps to algebraic spaces (Theorem 6.6), which establishes the uniqueness of good moduli spaces in this case. This implies in particular that good GIT quotients are unique in the category of algebraic spaces, not just in that of schemes. Section 7 introduces tame moduli spaces, which capture the properties of geometric quotients for actions of linearly reductive group schemes. Tame moduli spaces glue in a very straightforward fashion (Proposition 7.10). Section 8 is concerned with examples, including that of semi-stable sheaves, for which good moduli spaces do exist. Of course, these are not in general coarse moduli spaces because S-equivalent sheaves map to the same point. If one restricts to stable sheaves, then one obtains tame moduli spaces. The topology of stacks admitting good moduli spaces is discussed in Section 9, while Section 10 is concerned with the descent of vector bundles. Here it is proved that, if \(\phi:{\mathcal X}\to Y\) is a good moduli space with \({\mathcal X}\) locally Noetherian, then \(\phi^*\) induces an equivalence of categories between vector bundles on Y and the full subcategory of vector bundles on \({\mathcal X}\) with trivial stabiliser action at closed points (Theorem 10.3). In Section 11, Mumford's concept of stability is generalised to the present situation and, in particular, it is shown that, if \(p:{\mathcal X}\to S\) is quasi-compact with \({\mathcal X}\) an Artin stack, and \({\mathcal L}\) is a line bundle on \({\mathcal X}\), then there exists a good moduli space \(\phi:{\mathcal X^{ss}_{\mathcal L}}\to Y\) with the expected properties (Theorem 11.5). There is also a converse statement (similar to that of Mumford) stating that, if \({\mathcal X}\) is a noetherian regular Artin stack with affine diagonal over a quasi-compact scheme \(S\), then any open substack which admits a quasi-projective good moduli space is contained in the semistable locus for some line bundle (Theorem 11.14 (i)). Under the same conditions, if the moduli space is tame, then the open substack is contained in the stable locus (Theorem 11.14 (i)). Section 12 is concerned with linearly reductive group schemes and contains a proof of Matsushima's Theorem that, if \(H\) is a subgroup of a reductive group scheme \(G\), then \(H\) is reductive if and only if \(G/H\) is affine. Finally, in Section 13, some of the results are rephrased for the special case when \({\mathcal X}\) is a quotient stack by a linearly reductive group scheme.