Duality and flat base change on formal schemes

Abstract

We give several related versions of global Grothendieck Duality for unbounded complexes on noetherian formal schemes. The proofs, based on a non-trivial adaptation of Deligne's method for the special case of ordinary schemes, are reasonably self-contained, modulo the Special Adjoint Functor Theorem. An alternative approach, inspired by Neeman and based on recent results about "Brown Representability," is indicated as well. A section on applications and examples illustrates how these theorems synthesize a number of different duality-related results (local duality, formal duality, residue theorems, dualizing complexes...). A flat-base-change theorem for pseudo-proper maps leads in particular to sheafified versions of duality for bounded-below complexes with quasi-coherent homology. Thanks to Greenlees-May duality, the results take a specially nice form for proper maps and bounded-below complexes with coherent homology.