Representable tangent structures for affine schemes

Abstract

The category of affine schemes is a tangent category whose tangent bundle functor is induced by K\"ahler differentials, providing a direct link between algebraic geometry and tangent category theory. Moreover, this tangent bundle functor is represented by the ring of dual numbers. How special is this tangent structure? Are there any other (non-trivial) tangent structure on the category of affine schemes? In this paper, we characterize the representable tangent structures on the category of affine schemes. To this end, we introduce a useful tool, the notion of tangentoids, which are precisely the objects in a monoidal category that induce a tangent structure via tensoring. Furthermore, coexponentiable tangentoids induce tangent structures on the opposite category. As such, we first prove that tangentoids in the category of commutative unital algebras are equivalent to commutative associative solid non-unital algebras, that is, commutative associative non-unital algebras whose multiplication is an isomorphism. From there, we explain how representable tangent structures on affine schemes correspond to finitely generated projective commutative associative solid non-unital algebras. In particular, for affine schemes over a principal ideal domain, we show that there are precisely two representable tangent structures: the trivial one and the one given by K\"ahler differentials.