Projective length, phantom extensions, and the structure of flat modules

Abstract

We consider the natural generalization of the notion of the order of a phantom map from the topological setting to triangulated categories. When applied to the derived category of the category of countable flat modules over a countable Dedekind domain, this yields a notion of\emph{\ phantom extension} of order $α<ω_{1}$. We provide a complexity-theoretic characterization of the module $\mathrm{Ph}% ^{α}\mathrm{Ext}\left( C,A\right) $ of phantom extensions of order $α$ with respect to the structure of \emph{phantom Polish module} on $\mathrm{Ext}\left( C,A\right) $ obtained by considering it as an object of the left heart of the quasi-abelian category of Polish modules. We use this characterization to prove the following Dichotomy Theorem: either all the extensions of a countable flat module $A$ are trivial (which happens precisely when $A$ is divisible) or $A$ has phantom extensions of arbitrarily high order. By producing canonical phantom projective resolutions of order $α$, we prove that phantom extensions of order $α$ define on the category of countable flat modules an exact structure $\mathcal{E}_{α}$ that is hereditary with enough projectives, and the functor $\mathrm{Ph}^{α}% \mathrm{Ext}$ is the derived functor of $\mathrm{Hom}$ with respect to $\mathcal{E}_{α}$. We prove a Structure Theorem characterizing the objects of the class $\mathcal{P}_{α}$ of countable flat modules that have \emph{projective length at most }$α$ (i.e., are $\mathcal{E}_{α}$-projective) as the direct summands of colimits of presheaves of finite flat modules over well-founded forests of rank $% 1+α$ regarded as ordered sets. This can be seen as the first analogue in the flat case of the classical Ulm Classification Theorem for torsion modules.