group cohomology, nonabelian group cohomology, Lie group cohomology
cohomology with constant coefficients / with a local system of coefficients
differential cohomology
The way I first visualized a K-group was as a group of “classes of objects” of an abelian (or more generally, additive) category, such as coherent sheaves on an algebraic variety, or vector bundles, etc. I would presumably have called this group ( being a variety or any other kind of “space”), the initial letter of ‘class’, but my past in functional analysis may have prevented this, as designates also the space of continuous functions on (when is a topological space). Thus, I reverted to instead of , since my mother tongue is German, Class = Klasse (in German), and the sounds corresponding to and are the same.
Given a stable (∞,1)-category , its naive decategorification (its set of objects modulo the relation of equivalence) naturally inherits the structure of an abelian monoid from the biproducts in . That is, we define . We can then further pass to the Grothendieck group, adding formal additive inverses to get an abelian group.
Note that such a biproduct sits in a split (co)fibration sequence . Often we would like to obtain an analogous additivity result for arbitrary (co)fibration sequences (a.k.a. distinguished triangles). This requires imposing the relation for any fibration sequence , thereby passing to a quotient abelian group called , the K-group or Grothendieck group of ; see the latter entry for more details.
The “K” is chosen by Grothendieck for the German word Klasse for “class”. The K-group of is the group of equivalence classes of : it is a group due to the existence of a notion of exact sequences in .
K-theory starts with the study of these K-groups and their higher analogues , collectively denoted . Sometimes the K-groups themselves are called “K-theory”. One would say for instance: “ is the K-theory of .”
More generally, there is a symmetric groupal ∞-groupoid – i.e. a connective spectrum – in between the decategorification from to , for which is the set of connected components
and more generally .
In nice cases this is the degree 0 part of a non-connective spectrum which is then the K-theory spectrum of . This is also called the Waldhausen K-theory of .
Much of the literature on K-theory discusses constructions that model the above abstract setup in terms of model categories, or just their homotopy categories, often of the derived catgeories type and then often expressed in terms of the abelian category or more generally Quillen exact category from which the derived category is derived.
Only a subset of the structure on a model category is necessary in order to conveniently extract the K-groups of the presented stable (∞,1)-category. For that reason the axioms of a Waldhausen category have been devised to provide just the necessary convenient prerequisites to compute the K-groups of the (∞,1)-category presented by the underlying homotopical category.
In particular, the K-group associated to the stable (∞,1)-category of bounded chain complexes in an abelian category or exact category is often called the K-group of itself and just denoted
Most explicit constructions of K-theory spectra start with the data of an exact category, such as notably Quillen’s Q-construction and the Waldhausen S-construction.
In particular if the exact category is that of vector bundles on a topological space
the corresponding K-group is degree 0 topological K-theory. This was the original of the notion and the term K-theory.
Recall that given a (∞,1)-category , we may regard it as a complete Segal space , a bisimplicial set. For instance if is originally given as a quasicategory then
where denotes the maximal Kan complex inside the (∞,1)-category of (∞,1)-functors from to .
For an (∞,1)-category and , write for the full sub--category on on those objects for which
the diagonal is inhabited by zero objects, for all ;
all diagrams of the form
is an (∞,1)-pushout.
Let be a stable (∞,1)-category. Then its Waldhausen K-theory
is the geometric realization of/homotopy colimit of the degreewise core of the , def. , of the corresponding complete Segal space (as a simplicial diagram of -groupoids).
This is remark 11.4 in StCat. See also Blumberg-Gepner-Tabuada, section 7.
This construction is also conjectured in the last section of Toen-Vezzosi’s A remark on K-theory .
In the case that is the simplicial localization of a Waldhausen category the explicit way to obtain this is the Waldhausen S-construction.
It should be true that with this definition we have an isomorphism of groups
This Waldhausen/hocolim-construction gives the connective K-theory, taking values in connective spectra. The universal completion to functor that sends homotopy cofibers of stable (infinity,1)-categories to homotopy cofibers of spectra is the corresponding unconnective -functor.
There is a universal characterization of the construction of the -theory spectrum of a stable -category :
there is an -functor
to a stable -category which is universal with the property that it respects colimits and exact sequences in a suitable way. Given any stable -category , its (connective or non-connective, depending on details) algebraic K-theory spectrum is the hom-object
where denotes the stable -category of compact spectra. (BGT)
It was in
that it was proven that the the Waldhausen S-construction of the K-theory spectrum depends precisely on the simplicial localization of the Waldhausen category, i.e. of the (∞,1)-category that it presents.
In view of this remark 11.4 in
interprets the construction of the K-theory spectrum as a natural operation of stable (∞,1)-categories, as described above.
The universal property of the -categorical definition is studied in
The standard constructions of K-theory spectra from Quillen exact categories are discussed in detail in chapter 1 of
A useful introduction to the definition and computation of K-groups (with a little on K-spectra) is
Last revised on April 7, 2023 at 21:37:51. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.