Rational Modules for Corings

Abstract

In this paper we lay the basis of the theory of rational modules of corings extending results on rational modules for coalgebras to the case of arbitrary ground rings. We apply these results mainly to categories of entwined modules (e.g. Doi-Koppinen modules, alternative Doi-Koppinen modules) generalizing results of Y. Doi, M. Koppinen and C. Menini et al. on the categries of Doi-Hopf moduels and categories of relative Hopf modules.