Nonstandard étale cohomology (Q847696)

This paper is part of a very interesting new project of the two authors of developing nonstandard methods for algebraic geometry. The present article is a remarkable application of these techniques to the theory of étale cohomology. A drawback of étale cohomology, an important tool in arithmetic geometry, is the fact that it has good properties only with torsion or even finite coefficients, although one would like to obtain cohomology groups that are vector spaces over a field of characteristic zero. There are different ways to overcome this problem, one is the well-known \(\ell\)-adic cohomology, another more general and more sophisticated one is Jannsen's and Dwyer-Friedlander's continuous cohomology which agrees with the latter one for smooth projective schemes over a field. The paper under review provides an astonishing new approach. Using infinite prime numbers in nonstandard integers one can construct fields of characteristic zero which behave in many respects like finite fields. This yields an étale cohomology theory with characteristic zero coefficients but the good behavior of finite coefficients. In order to achieve this goal, the authors study an enlarged category of nonstandard étale sheaves and the associated sheaf cohomology theory, which is in fact a Weil cohomology theory. In particular, the definition of nonstandard étale cohomology is given as a derived functor which is also one of the advantages of \textit{U. Jannsen}'s construction of continuous cohomology for schemes in [Math. Ann. 280, No.2, 207--245 (1988; Zbl 0649.14011)]. Moreover, there is also a generalized Hochschild-Serre spectral sequence for nonstandard étale cohomology. In the final section nonstandard étale and \(\ell\)-adic cohomology are compared and shown to agree for smooth projective varieties over algebraically closed fields for infinitely many primes \(\ell\).