Local cohomology and support for triangulated categories

Abstract

We propose a new method for defining a notion of support for objects in any compactly generated triangulated category admitting small coproducts. This approach is based on a construction of local cohomology functors on triangulated categories, with respect to a central ring of operators. Suitably specialized one recovers, for example, the theory for commutative noetherian rings due to Foxby and Neeman, the theory of Avramov and Buchweitz for complete intersection local rings, and varieties for representations of finite groups according to Benson, Carlson, and Rickard. We give explicit examples of objects whose triangulated support and cohomological support differ. In the case of group representations, this allows us to correct and establish a conjecture of Benson.