Wednesday, 12 March 2008

Torsors in Algebraic Geometry?

So thanks to the comments of Tyler Lawson I have been able to figure out what is happening in this example, so I thought I should post it as an answer. I think this is also what Torsten Ekedahl was getting at in his comment, as well.



I think it helps to be extra clear because this example is rather confusing. For starters there is the group scheme, mathbbGtoS.

In this example S=mathbbA1 is the affine line. This is a group object over S, so it can be thought of as an S-family of group schemes. At the points x1 and x2 it is the trivial group, and at all other points it is some fixed abelian group A. For a concrete example we can take A=mathbbZ/3, and then mathbbG looks something like this:



alt text



The bottom line represents S. Notice that there is a unique global section, the zero section. Away from the set Y=x1cupx2, there are more sections. Associated to mathbbG is a sheaf on the site of schemes over S. This is the same sheaf I called ACY.



As outlined in the question we have that checkH1(S;ACY)=A is non-trivial. We can even construct a non-trivial cocycle using the covering consisting of the two open subsets
U1=Sx1


U2=Sx2

Notice that U12=U1timesSU2=CY, the complement of Y in S. This is exactly the subspace that supports a section. The picture is a little misleading here as it looks like there are lots of sections over CY. However, because we are using the Zariski topology we have only A-many of them. Such a section over CY has to be constant on CY.



Now each of these sections (of which there are A-many) gives rise to a Cech cocycle and so we should be able to construct a mathbbG-torsor over S for each one of these. The usual construction is that this torsor is given as the coequalizer of
U12timesSmathbbGrightrightarrowscoprodUitimesSmathbbG


Where one map is the usual inclusion and the other is also inclusion (the other one), but twisted using the cocycle.



Now the cocycle is only defined over CY. And over the complement of CY, namely Y, mathbbG is trivial. It has a unique fiber. So I restricted attention to just the "interesting part", the CY part. Then I got that the coequalizer becomes,
CYtimesArightrightarrows(CYcupCY)timesA


which has trivial coequalizer CYtimesA. All of these are true facts, except the part about CY being the only interesting part. I was wrongly assuming that if the torsor was trivial over this part, then it had to be isomorphic to mathbbG.



This is not the case. Somehow Tyler's comments made me realize this. The actual full colimit looks something like this:



alt text



Notice that this space is a trivial CYtimesA-torsor when restricted to CY, and over U1 and U2 there exist unique sections. However there is no global section, so it is not a globally trivial object. Let's call this object P.



A little book keeping shows that there is an action of schemes over S,
mathbbGtimesSPtoP


making P into a torsor in the second sense.




So this is not a counter example. Both notions of torsor agree here.




But this raises the question:




Question: Do these two a priori different notions of torsor agree in Algebraic Geometry? If not what is the easiest counter example?




I don't know the answer to this.

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