Flasque resolution

In mathematics, injective sheaves of abelian groups are used to construct the resolutions needed to define sheaf cohomology (and other derived functors, such as sheaf Ext).

There is a further group of related concepts applied to sheaves: flabby (flasque in French), fine, soft (mou in French), acyclic. In the history of the subject they were introduced before the 1957 "Tohoku paper" of Alexander Grothendieck, which showed that the abelian category notion of injective object sufficed to found the theory. The other classes of sheaves are historically older notions. The abstract framework for defining cohomology and derived functors does not need them. However, in most concrete situations, resolutions by acyclic sheaves are often easier to construct. Acyclic sheaves therefore serve for computational purposes, for example the Leray spectral sequence.

An injective sheaf F is a sheaf that is an injective object of the category of abelian sheaves; in other words, homomorphisms from A to F can always be lifted to any sheaf B containing A.

The category of abelian sheaves has enough injective objects: this means that any sheaf is a subsheaf of an injective sheaf. This result of Grothendieck follows from the existence of a generator of the category (it can be written down explicitly, and is related to the subobject classifier). This is enough to show that right derived functors of any left exact functor exist and are unique up to canonical isomorphism.

For technical purposes, injective sheaves are usually superior to the other classes of sheaves mentioned above: they can do almost anything the other classes can do, and their theory is simpler and more general. In fact, injective sheaves are flabby (flasque), soft, and acyclic. However, there are situations where the other classes of sheaves occur naturally, and this is especially true in concrete computational situations.

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