Locally noetherian quiver representations

Abstract

It is shown that a quiver is left noetherian if and only if the category of quiver representations in any locally noetherian abelian category is again locally noetherian. Here, locally noetherian means that any object is the directed union of its noetherian subobjects. For a quiver to be left noetherian means that the left ideals of paths starting at any fixed vertex satisfy the ascending chain condition. The proof generalises to representations of any small category that admits a Gr\"obner enrichment.