Friday, 25 June 2010

ag.algebraic geometry - Motivation for the étale topology over other possibilities

In the search for a Weil cohomology theory H over a field K (with textchar(K)=0) for varieties in characteristic p, a classical argument by Serre shows that the coefficient field cannot be a subfield of mathbbR or of mathbbQp; an obvious choice is to take mathbbQell for a prime ellneqp.



Now, we can try to make a Weil cohomology theory by taking the sheaf cohomology with constant sheaves with the Zariski topology, but this does not work as all cohomology vanishes.
Grothendieck's insight was that we can find a different topology, for example the étale topology. Then we can build a Weil cohomology theory with coefficients in mathbbQell by taking cohomology with coefficients in the constant sheaves mathbbZ/ellnmathbbZ and then taking the inverse limit with respect to n and tensor with mathbbQell: this gives ell-adic cohomology.



But it is not so clear to me why the étale topology is best suited at this task. What happens if we repeat the above procedure on other sites? Does the cohomology theory we get fail to be a Weil cohomology theory?



P.S.: Information for fields other than mathbbQell would also be nice!

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