Sierra, Susan

Gordon, Iain

Crawford, Simon Philip

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

2018-09-04T10:33:30Z

2018-09-04T10:33:30Z

2018-11-29

The primary objects of study in this thesis are noncommutative surfaces; that is, noncommutative noetherian domains of GK dimension 2. Frequently these rings will also be singular, in the sense that they have infinite global dimension. Very little is known about singularities of noncommutative rings, particularly those which are not finite over their centre. In this thesis, we are able to give a precise description of the singularities of a few families of examples. In many examples, we lay the foundations of noncommutative singularity theory by giving a precise description of the singularities of the fundamental examples of noncommutative surfaces. We draw comparisons with the fundamental examples of commutative surface singularities, called Kleinian singularities, which arise from the action of a finite subgroup of SL(2; k) acting on a polynomial ring. The main tool we use to study the singularities of noncommutative surfaces is the singularity category, first introduced by Buchweitz in [Buc86]. This takes a (possibly noncommutative) ring R and produces a triangulated category Dsg(R) which provides a measure of "how singular" R is. Roughly speaking, the size of this category reflects how bad the singularity is; in particular, Dsg(R) is trivial if and only if R has finite global dimension. In [CBH98], Crawley-Boevey-Holland introduced a family of noncommutative rings which can be thought of as deformations of the coordinate ring of a Kleinian singularity. We give a precise description of the singularity categories of these deformations, and show that their singularities can be thought of as unions of (commutative) Kleinian singularities. In particular, our results show that deforming a singularity in this setting makes it no worse. Another family of noncommutative surfaces were introduced by Rogalski-Sierra-Stafford in [RSS15b]. The authors showed that these rings share a number of ring-theoretic properties with deformations of type A Kleinian singularities. We apply our techniques to show that the "least singular" example has an A1 singularity, and conjecture that other examples exhibit similar behaviour. In [CKWZ16a], Chan-Kirkman-Walton-Zhang gave a definition for a quantum version of Kleinian singularities. These require the data of a two-dimensional AS regular algebra A and a finite group G acting on A with trivial homological determinant. We extend a number of results in [CBH98] to the setting of quantum Kleinian singularities. More precisely, we show that one can construct deformations of the skew group rings A#G and the invariant rings AG, and then determine some of their ring-theoretic properties. These results allow us to give a precise description of the singularity categories of quantum Kleinian singularities, which often have very different behaviour to their non-quantum analogues.

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/31543

en

The University of Edinburgh

S. Crawford, Singularity categories of deformations of Kleinian singularities, arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.08430 (2016).

S. Crawford, Azumaya skew group algebras and an application to quantum Kleinian singularities, arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.08669 (2017).

ring theory

abstract algebra

commutative ring

singular points

noncommutative surfaces

Singularities of noncommutative surfaces

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy