Tensor triangular Chow groups (Q390941)

Thanks to the the author's previous work, it is possible to reconstruct a scheme from its derived category of perfect complexes, provided we equip the latter with its derived tensor product. The scheme is recovered by means of the ``triangular spectrum'' construction, \(\mathrm{Spc}(T)\), which can be applied to any abstract tensor triangulated category~\(T\) to yield a nice (locally ringed) space in a functorial way. This is the starting point of ``tensor triangular geometry'', which is a geometric theory of tensor triangulated categories generalizing algebraic geometry (see [\textit{P. Balmer}, in: Proceedings of the international congress of mathematicians (ICM 2010), Hyderabad, India, August 2010. Vol. II: Invited lectures. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific; New Delhi: Hindustan Book Agency. 85--112 (2011; Zbl 1235.18012)]). This very short paper addresses the question: How should we generalize the definition of the Chow group of a scheme, so that it still make good sense for more general tensor triangulated categories? Assuming that the tensor triangulated category~\(T\) is rigid and its spectrum Noetherian (which is quite reasonable), the proposed definition reads as follows. The group of ``generalized \(p\)-cycles'' of~\(T\) is the direct sum, over all \(p\)-dimensional points \(P\in \mathrm{Spc}(T)\) in the spectrum, of the (triangulated) Grothendieck \(K\)-group \(K_0(\mathrm{Min}(T_P))\), where \(\mathrm{Min}(T_P)\) denotes the subcategory of objects with minimum support in \(T_P\), the local category of \(T\) at~\(P\). This notion works for any reasonable dimension function on the spectrum. The Chow group of~\(T\) is then obtained from the group of cycles by quotienting out a suitable subgroup of boundaries. Two different definitions of boundaries are proposed here, and at least one of them allows to recover the Chow group of a scheme in the regular case. Both definitions make geometric sense in view of the classical theory. Their precise relationship and several other questions are investigated by the author's PhD student, Sebastian Klein.