Wednesday, 9 July 2008

ra.rings and algebras - What is an algebraic group over a noncommutative ring?

Let R be a (noncommutative) ring. (For me, the words "ring" and "algebra" are isomorphic, and all rings are associative with unit, and usually noncommutative.) Then I think I know what "linear algebra in characteristic R" should be: it should be the study of the category Rtextbimod of (R,R)-bimodules. For example, an R-algebra on the one hand is a ring S with a ring map RtoS. But this is the same as a ring object in the Rtextbimod. When R is a field, we recover the usual linear algebra over R; in particular, when R=mathbbZ/p, we recover linear algebra in characteristic p.



Suppose that G is an algebraic group (or perhaps I mean "group scheme", and maybe I should say "over mathbbZ"); then my understanding is that for any commutative ring R we have a notion of G(R), which is the group G with coefficients in R. (Probably there are some subtleties and modifications to what I just said.)




My question: What is the right notion of an algebraic group "in characteristic R"?




It's certainly a bit funny. For example, it's reasonable to want GL(1,R) to consist of all invertible elements in R. On the other hand, in Rtextbimod, the group textAut(R,R) consists of invertible elements in the center Z(R).



Incidentally, I'm much more interested in how the definitions must be modified to accommodate noncommutativity than in how they must be modified to accommodate non-invertibility. So I'm happy to set R=mathbbH, the skew field of quaternions. Or R=mathbbK[[x,y]], where mathbbK is a field and x,y are noncommuting formal variables.

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