Reflective and coreflective subcategories (Q2684775)

The celebrated Freyd's adjoint functor theorem [\textit{P. Freyd}, Abelian categories. An introduction to the theory of functors. New York-Evanston-London: Harper and Row, Publishers (1964; Zbl 0121.02103); Repr. Theory Appl. Categ. 2003, No. 3, xxiii, 1--164 (2003; Zbl 1041.18001), Chapter 3] claims that a functor \(F:\mathcal{B}\rightarrow \mathcal{C}\) with \(\mathcal{B}\) complete is of a left adjoint iff it preserves all limits and abides by a so-called solution-set conditions. The conjunction of product-preserving plus the solution-set condition is highly related to the condition that the essential image \(\mathrm{Im}(F)\) is a preenveoping categoryf of \(\mathcal{C}\). The natural question to aski is whether this condition is also sufficient. This paper is mainly interested in the case when \(\mathcal{C}\) is an arbitrary additive category and \(F\) is the inclusion functor. The paper aims to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the subcategory \(\mathcal{B}\) to be (co)reflective, asking what are the minimal conditions to add to the preenveloping (resp. precovering) condition on \(\mathcal{B}\) for to be a reflective (resp. coreflective) subcategory of \(\mathcal{C}\). The authors' interest in the question comes from a result of \textit{A. Neeman} [Ann. Math. (2) 171, No. 3, 2143--2155 (2010; Zbl 1205.18008), Proposition 1.4] claiming that if \(\mathcal{C}\) is a triangulated category with split idempotents, then a full triangulated subcategory \(\mathcal{B}\) is coreflective iff it is precovering and closed under direct summands, which was slightly generalized by \textit{M. Saorín} and \textit{J. Šťovíček} [Adv. Math. 228, No. 2, 968--1007 (2011; Zbl 1235.18010), Proposition 3.11] to the mere assumption that \(\mathcal{B}\) is a suspended subcategory. The common flavor of these results in triangulated and abelian worlds leads the authors to study the above mentioned question in a general context that includes both worlds. The synopsis of the paper goes as follows. \begin{itemize} \item[\S 2] introduces most of the concepts required in this paper. \item[\S 3] gives the basic Theorem 3.1 claiming that if \(\mathcal{C}\) is any additive category with split idempotents, pseudokernels and pseudocokernels, then a subcategory \(\mathcal{B}\) is coreflective iff it is precovering, closed under direct summands and every morphism in \(\mathcal{B}\) has a pseudocokernel in \(\mathcal{C}\) that belongs to \(\mathcal{B}\). \item[\S 4] applies these theorems to one-sided triangulated categories and pretriangulated categories in the sense of [\textit{A. Beligiannis} and \textit{I. Reiten}, Homological and homotopical aspects of torsion theories. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2007; Zbl 1124.18005)]. \item[\S 5] considers any abelian category \(\mathcal{A}\) and any preenveloping (resp. precovering) subcategory \(\mathcal{P}\), in which case the stable category \underline{\(\mathcal{A}\)}\(=\mathcal{A}/\mathcal{P}\) is a right (resp. left) triangulated category. \item[\S 6] shows that exactly definable additive categories have split idempotents, pseudokernels and pseudocokernels (Proposition 6.3), so that Theorem 3.1 applies to them. \item[\S 7] shows that if \(\mathcal{A}\) is a preabelian category, then a subcategory \(\mathcal{B}\) is coreflective iff it is precovering and closed under taking cokernels. In the particular case when \(\mathcal{A}\) is abelian, a handy criterion for such a coreflective subcategory to be also abelian is given (Theorem 7.6). \item[\S 8] gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the subcategory \(\mathrm{Pres}(\mathcal{U})\) of objects presented by some set \(\mathcal{U}\) of objects to be coreflective, coreflective abelian or coreflective abelian exact, respectively (Theorems 8.5, 8.6 and 8.9). \item[\S 9] shows several applications of the previous results. It is particularly shown (Theorem 9.14) that fully exact subcategories of module categories over small preadditive categories are always bireflective, being exactly the ones induced by an epimorphism of preadditive categories, which is an extension of the famous theorem of \textit{P. Gabriel} and \textit{J. A. de la Peña} [Commun. Algebra 15, 279--307 (1987; Zbl 0609.16013)] claiming the result for module categories over rings. \end{itemize}