Famous Fourier-Mukai Results II (Orlov’s Result and the Beilinson Resolution)
This a continuation of this post, and this post follows the paper of Orlov. I’m going to give a rough outline to the following result
(Orlov’s Result) Any functor which is full, faithful and exact is represented by an object on the product.
The proof is long and complicated so I’ll only attempt to give a flavor of the ideas used in the proof. One central part of the proof is the Beilinson resolution of the diagonal of projective space:
(0)
where is the structure sheaf on
and
.
Constructing the resolution
Start with what is sometimes called the Euler sequence on $\mathbb{P}^N$ (here is the tangent bundle):
locally:
(1)
Note for
and
from the les in cohomology. Now from the Kunneth formula in algebraic geometry:
I’ll make use of the global section corresponding to the identity. Now . Locally the identity corresponds to a map
so at this is
and in view of (1) its locally the inclusion followed by the projection:
the only point in this local description is that iff
, i.e.
, in other words
vanishes exactly on the diagonal.
If is a vector then there is a contraction map
via
.
Now contraction with gives a map
and these are exactly the maps that appear in the Beilinson resolution.
A rough outline
Now to Orlov’s result. From the data I need to produce an object
.
The first step is to use that is projective to get an embedding
and consider the functor
Now that has entered the picture we can utilize the Beilinson resolution (0), and using
obtain a complex
(2)
where . I’m brushing a lot under the rug, it takes a bit of work to actually come up with this complex.
Convolution
Now I need a powerful tool which I don’t have a firm grasp of and I can’t really explain here.
Let be a bounded complex. A left Postnikov system of
is a diagram:
where the stared triangles are distinguished and the triangles with circles are commutative. An object is a left convolution of
if there is a left Postnikov system such that
. Denote by
the class of all convolutions of
.
Prop. If for
and
then
has a convolution
. Further, if
and
then all convolutions are canonically isomorphic.
Remark: I don’t have a great way of motivating this convolution business but its not a very geometric tool and in this post I’m trying to focus on the geometry that goes into this proof.
Continuing, the idea is now to the use the proposition with the complex (2) to obtain an object . Next one can show that
basically by showing that both are convolutions of the same complex. With this result one can ultimately show
. I’m not including the details because I want to focus on the rough idea and I want to avoid making an overly long post.
What’s Left
The functor has been represented by an object on the product. Using general Fourier-Mukai properties see e.g. this post, it remains to find an object
such that
.
The object is produced in much the same way as
is produced. Using and ample line bundle on
obtain a resolution for the diagonal on
and using
obtain a complex on
much like (2), then use the proposition to get a convolution
. The details are a little different and more complicated because
is understandably more explicit than a general smooth projective variety
.
The object does not represent
. Instead, using cohomological properties, one decomposes
and
and then a another argument is needed go show
.
I’m tempted to say that this was much less then even a rough outline of the proof. But I really only wanted to discuss the Beilinson resolution and even though I was brief with Orlov’s result I think its clear that the Beilinson resolution is one of the key ideas behind it.
About this entry
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- Published:
- June 20, 2010 / 10:58 pm
- Category:
- alg. geo.

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