Orbifold Cohomology as Periodic Cyclic Homology

Abstract

It known from the work of Feigin-Tsygan, Weibel and Keller that the cohomology groups of a smooth complex variety X can be recovered from (roughly speaking) its derived category of coherent sheaves. In this paper we show that for a finite group G acting on X the same procedure applied to G-equivariant sheaves gives the orbifold cohomology of X/G. As an application, in some cases we are able to obtain simple proofs of an additive isomorphism between the orbifold cohomology of X/G and the usual cohomology of its crepant resolution (the general equality of Euler and Hodge numbers was obtained earlier by various authors). We also state some conjectures on the product structures, as well as the singular case; and a connection with recent work by Kawamata.