Reflective subcategories (Q4939465)

The authors study reflective subcategories of categories in the classical terminology. Recall that, given a full subcategory \({\mathcal F}\) of a category \({\mathcal A}\), the existence of \({\mathcal F}\)-envelopes completing diagrams in a unique way is equivalent to saying that \({\mathcal F}\) is a reflective subcategory of \({\mathcal A}\) . The basic result of the paper states that for well-powered categories \({\mathcal A}\) and full subcategories \({\mathcal F}\) of \({\mathcal A}\) such that equalizers of \({\mathcal F}\)-morphisms and intersections of them exist in \({\mathcal A}\) the reflectivity of \({\mathcal F}\) in \({\mathcal A}\) is equivalent to \({\mathcal F}\) being covariantly finite in \({\mathcal A}\) and closed for intersections of equalizers of \({\mathcal F}\)-morphisms. As a corollory the authors obtain a generalization of Freyd's adjoint functor theorem to not necessarily complete categories. In the second half of the paper a lot of applications are given and examples of reflective subcategories of abelian and module categories are studied. Mainly, results on subcategories of the form \({\mathcal C}opres(M)\) and \({\mathcal A}dd(M)\) are obtained. For instance it is shown that for well-powered categories \({\mathcal A}\) and objects \(M\) of \({\mathcal A}\), \({\mathcal C}opres(M)\) is reflective in \({\mathcal A}\) if and only if it is closed for kernels. Moreover, a lot of sufficient conditions are stated for \({\mathcal C}opres(M)\) to be reflective in the case of well-powered categories. For artinian commutative rings \(R\) the self-injectivity of \(R\) is equivalent to \({\mathcal C}opres(R)\) being reflective in \({\mathcal M}od_R\). For subcategories of the form \({\mathcal A}dd(M)\) it is shown that \({\mathcal A}dd(M)\) is reflective in \({\mathcal M}od_R\) if and only if \({\mathcal A}dd(M)= {\mathcal C}opres(M)\). Finally, the reflectivity of \({\mathcal A}dd(M)\) is studied for self-small \(M\) and the connection between the reflectivity of \({\mathcal A}dd(M_R)\) and \({\mathcal A}dd(M_{\overline{R}})\), where \(\overline{R}= \text{End}(_{\text{End}(M_R)}M))\). The case of \({\mathcal A}dd(M)\) covers also the study of all covariantly finite, generalized Krull-Schmidt subcategories of \({\mathcal M}od_R\) and has some connections with the pure-semisimple conjecture. Most results of the first part which are obtained are dualizable and provide therefore corresponding results for coreflective subcategories.