The Boolean spectrum of a Grothendieck category

Abstract

A notion of support for objects in any Grothendieck category is introduced. This is based on the spectral category of a Grothendieck category and uses its Boolean lattice of localising subcategories. The support provides a classification of all subcategories that are closed under arbitrary coproducts, subobjects, and essential extensions. There is also a notion of exact support which classifies certain thick subcategories. As an application, the coproduct decompositions of objects are described in terms of Boolean lattices. Also, for any ring Crawley-Boevey's correspondence between definable subcategories of modules and closed subsets of the Ziegler spectrum is extended.