Tuesday, 18 January 2011

definitions - What is a proper stack?

I have seen the use of the word "proper Deligne-Mumford stack". Now, it is clear to me what it means for a morphism f of stacks to be proper: as usual it should be representable, and every morphism between schemes obtained from f by base change should be proper.



Now, first I guess that "proper" here actually means "complete". A scheme over a field is complete when the structural morphism to a point is proper. But it does not make sense for a stack to ask that the morphism to the point is proper. Indeed it would be in particular representable, and since a point is a scheme this would imply that the stack itself is a scheme.



Another possibility is that the sentence means "a stack with a proper atlas", so that one cannot speak of proper stacks, but only of proper Deligne-Mumford stacks.



So I am asking here what the standard terminology is.

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