Quadratic bimodules and quadratic orders. (Q1775531)

Many problems of representation theory are related or can be reduced to bimodule problems. Roiter has shown that in its most general (categorical) sense, the concept of bimodule (bocs) is most universal in representation theory. In the present article, quadratic extensions of rings and categories are introduced and studied, and it is shown that these concepts apply to a multitude of interesting cases. In the theory of Bass orders, infinite chains of successive overorders play a fundamental part. Hijikata and Nishida have shown that these chains of Bass orders correspond to extensions of semisimple algebras of index two. There are essentially five types of such minimal quadratic extensions which make up the building blocks of normal quadratic ring extensions. Furthermore, there are the triangular extensions, the prototype of which is given by the embedding of a triangular matrix ring into a full matrix ring over a skew-field. Apart from their original occurrence in connection with Bass orders, quadratic ring extensions arise in the theory of orders with Green walks, special biserial algebras, clannish algebras, and other types of algebras and orders. They easily generalize to quadratic extensions of arbitrary Krull-Schmidt categories. As an important tool, the author establishes a reduction functor for quadratic bimodules. (It applies, e.g., to the famous Gelfand problem first studied by Nazarova and Roiter in the early seventies.) In contrast to the reduction of Roiter's bocses, the quadratic bimodule reduction works without a differential and is nevertheless closed in the sense that it does not leave the range of quadratic bimodules. In the context of a given bimodule problem, the objects to be classified belong to full subcategories \({\mathcal N}^W\) parametrized by certain walks \(W\) which can be regarded as generalized Green walks. For a cyclic walk \(W\), the objects in \({\mathcal N}^W\) are related to the regular modules over some tame hereditary algebra. The paper shows that quadratic bimodules over an additive category are quite fundamental in representation theory. Moreover, the tame situations studied here might lead to an extension of the concept of tameness to orders over a complete discrete valuation domain.