Refined blowups (Q530621)

The aim of the paper is to introduce, and discuss basic properties of, so-called refined blow-ups. These are a natural non-commutative generalisation of usual blow-ups, and are motivated by the authors' desire to better understand the structure of the algorithm leading to the categorical resolution of singularities [\textit{A. Kuznetsov} and \textit{V. A. Lunts}, Int. Math. Res. Not. 2015, No. 13, 4536--4625 (2015; Zbl 1338.14020)]. Especifically the notion of refined blow-up absorbs, as special cases, two quite different constructions appearing as building blocks from [loc. cit.]. The idea behind the construction is to fully profit from the fact that a blow-up is the Proj of a sheaf of algebras, which arises as the graded algebra for the natural filtration by powers of the ideal sheaf we are blowing up. This point of view leads naturally, for any noetherian scheme \(X\) and closed subscheme \(Z\), to the notion of \(Z\)-filtered sheaves: sheaves \(\mathcal E\) with a flirtation such that \(I_Z\cdot F^n\mathcal E\subset F^{n+1}\mathcal E\). The \(n\)-th refined blow-up of \(X\) along \(Z\), denoted by \(\mathrm{Bl}_n(X,Z)\), is the quotient of the \textit{filtered} derived category of \(Z\)-filtered sheaves by the subcategory generated by complexes of \(n\)-stable and torsion ones (i.e. those \(Z\)-filtered sheaves \(\mathcal E\) such that \(F^n\mathcal E=\mathcal E\) and \(F^N\mathcal E=0\) if \(N\gg 0\)). An important result of the paper, Proposition 1.8, states that the natural functor \(D^b(X)\to\mathrm{Bl}_n(X,Z)\) is fully faithful for \(n\gg 0\), and this provides a partial categorical resolution of \(X\). Moreover, the existence of a semi-orthogonal decomposition \(\mathrm{Bl}_n(X,Z)= \langle\mathrm{Bl}_0(X,Z), D^b(Z),\dots , D^b(Z)\rangle\) is explained.