Which abelian tensor categories are geometric?

Daniel Schäppi

Published 2013-12-22, updated 2014-05-02Version 2

For a large class of geometric objects, the passage to categories of quasi-coherent sheaves provides an embedding in the 2-category of abelian tensor categories. The notion of weakly Tannakian categories introduced by the author gives a characterization of tensor categories in the image of this embedding. However, this notion requires additional structure to be present, namely a fiber functor. For the case of classical Tannakian categories in characteristic zero, Deligne has found intrinsic properties - expressible entirely within the language of tensor categories - which are necessary and sufficient for the existence of a fiber functor. In this paper we generalize Deligne's result to weakly Tannakian categories in characteristic zero. The class of geometric objects whose tensor categories of quasi-coherent sheaves can be recognized in this manner includes both the gerbes arising in classical Tannaka duality and more classical geometric objects such as projective varieties over a field of characteristic zero. Our proof uses a different perspective on fiber functors, which we formalize through the notion of geometric tensor categories. A second application of this perspective allows us to describe categories of quasi-coherent sheaves on fiber products.