Approximating triangulated categories by spaces

Abstract

We initiate a systematic study of lattices of thick subcategories for arbitrary essentially small triangulated categories. To this end we give several examples illustrating the various properties these lattices may, or may not, have and show that as soon as a lattice of thick subcategories is distributive it is automatically a spatial frame. We then construct two non-commutative spectra, one functorial and one with restricted functoriality, that give universal approximations of these lattices by spaces.