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.