Highest weight categories and stability conditions

Alessio Cipriani, Jon Woolf

Published 2024-10-17Version 1

Highest weight categories are an abstraction of the representation theory of semisimple Lie algebras introduced by Cline, Parshall and Scott in the late 1980s. There are by now many characterisations of when an abelian category is highest weight, but most are hard to verify in practice. We present two new criteria - one numerical in terms of the Grothendieck group, and one in terms of Bridegland stability conditions - which are easier to verify. We relate them to a criterion by Green and Schroll for when modules over a monomial algebra are highest weight.