On Absolute Algebraic Geometry, the affine case

Abstract

We develop algebraic geometry for general Segal's Gamma-rings and show that this new theory unifies two approaches we had considered earlier on (for a geometry under Spec Z). The starting observation is that the category obtained by gluing together the category of commutative rings and that of pointed commutative monoids, that we used in our previous work to define F1-schemes, is naturally a full subcategory of the category of Segal's Gamma-rings. In this paper we develop the affine case of this general algebraic geometry: one distinctive feature is that the spectrum Spec(A) of a Gamma-ring is in general a Grothendieck site rather than a point set endowed with a topology. Two striking features of this new geometry are that it is the natural domain for cyclic homology and for homological algebra, and that new operations, which do not make sense in ordinary algebraic geometry, are here available. For instance, in this new context, the quotient of a ring by a multiplicative subgroup is still a Gamma-ring to which our general theory applies. Thus the adele class space gives rise naturally to a Gamma-ring. Finally, we show that our theory is not a special case of the Töen-Vaqui\' e general theory of algebraic geometry under Spec Z.