Brown representability and flat covers (Q5928476)

This paper presents surprising connections between the notions of Brown representability for exact contravariant functors from a compactly generated triangulated category \(\mathcal T\) (with subcategory of compact objects \(\mathcal F\)) to the category of Abelian groups \(\text{Ab}\), and flat covers which appear in module theory. The main result establishes the equivalence of Brown representability for cofunctors \({\mathcal T}\to\text{Ab}\) and the existence of flat covers for additive functors \({\mathcal F}\to\text{Ab}\) and other flatness conditions. It is worth remarking that the conjecture of Enochs mentioned in the introduction has recently been proved, see \textit{L. Bican, R. El Bashir} and \textit{E. Enochs} [All modules have flat covers, Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 33, No. 4, 385-390 (2001)].