Hochschild cohomology of abelian categories and ringed spaces

Abstract

This paper continues the development of the deformation theory of abelian categories introduced in a previous paper by the authors. We show first that the deformation theory of abelian categories is controlled by an obstruction theory in terms of a suitable notion of Hochschild cohomology for abelian categories. We then show that this Hochschild cohomology coincides with the one defined by Gerstenhaber, Schack and Swan in the case of module categories over diagrams and schemes and also with the Hochschild cohomology for exact categories introduced recently by Keller. In addition we show in complete generality that Hochschild cohomology satisfies a Mayer-Vietoris property and that for constantly ringed spaces it coincides with the cohomology of the structure sheaf.