Étale cohomology

In mathematics, the étale cohomology groups of an algebraic variety or scheme are algebraic analogues of the usual cohomology groups with finite coefficients of a topological space, introduced by Grothendieck in order to prove the Weil conjectures. Étale cohomology theory can be used to construct ℓ-adic cohomology, which is an example of a Weil cohomology theory in algebraic geometry. This has many applications, such as the proof of the Weil conjectures and the construction of representations of finite groups of Lie type. In mathematics, the étale cohomology groups of an algebraic variety or scheme are algebraic analogues of the usual cohomology groups with finite coefficients of a topological space, introduced by Grothendieck in order to prove the Weil conjectures. Étale cohomology theory can be used to construct ℓ-adic cohomology, which is an example of a Weil cohomology theory in algebraic geometry. This has many applications, such as the proof of the Weil conjectures and the construction of representations of finite groups of Lie type. Étale cohomology was introduced by Alexander Grothendieck (1960), using some suggestions by Jean-Pierre Serre, and was motivated by the attempt to construct a Weil cohomology theory in order to prove the Weil conjectures. The foundations were soon after worked out by Grothendieck together with Michael Artin, and published as (Artin 1962) and SGA 4. Grothendieck used étale cohomology to prove some of the Weil conjectures (Bernard Dwork had already managed to prove the rationality part of the conjectures in 1960 using p-adic methods), and the remaining conjecture, the analogue of the Riemann hypothesis was proved by Pierre Deligne (1974) using ℓ-adic cohomology. Further contact with classical theory was found in the shape of the Grothendieck version of the Brauer group; this was applied in short order to diophantine geometry, by Yuri Manin. The burden and success of the general theory was certainly both to integrate all this information, and to prove general results such as Poincaré duality and the Lefschetz fixed point theorem in this context. Grothendieck originally developed étale cohomology in an extremely general setting, working with concepts such as Grothendieck toposes and Grothendieck universes. With hindsight, much of this machinery proved unnecessary for most practical applications of the étale theory, and Deligne (1977) gave a simplified exposition of étale cohomology theory. Grothendieck's use of these universes (whose existence cannot be proved in Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory) led to some uninformed speculation that étale cohomology and its applications (such as the proof of Fermat's last theorem) needed axioms beyond ZFC. In practice étale cohomology is used mainly for constructible sheaves over schemes of finite type over the integers, and this needs no deep axioms of set theory: with a little care it can be constructed in this case without using any uncountable sets, and this can easily be done in ZFC (and even in much weaker theories). Étale cohomology quickly found other applications, for example Deligne and George Lusztig used it to construct representations of finite groups of Lie type; see Deligne–Lusztig theory. For complex algebraic varieties, invariants from algebraic topology such as the fundamental group and cohomology groups are very useful, and one would like to have analogues of these for varieties over other fields, such as finite fields. (One reason for this is that Weil suggested that the Weil conjectures could be proved using such a cohomology theory.) In the case of cohomology of coherent sheaves, Serre showed that one could get a satisfactory theory just by using the Zariski topology of the algebraic variety, and in the case of complex varieties this gives the same cohomology groups (for coherent sheaves) as the much finer complex topology. However, for constant sheaves such as the sheaf of integers this does not work: the cohomology groups defined using the Zariski topology are badly behaved. For example, Weil envisioned a cohomology theory for varieties over finite fields with similar power as the usual singular cohomology of topological spaces, but in fact, any constant sheaf on an irreducible variety has trivial cohomology (all higher cohomology groups vanish). The reason that the Zariski topology does not work well is that it is too coarse: it has too few open sets. There seems to be no good way to fix this by using a finer topology on a general algebraic variety. Grothendieck's key insight was to realize that there is no reason why the more general open sets should be subsets of the algebraic variety: the definition of a sheaf works perfectly well for any category, not just the category of open subsets of a space. He defined étale cohomology by replacing the category of open subsets of a space by the category of étale mappings to a space: roughly speaking, these can be thought of as open subsets of finite unbranched covers of the space. These turn out (after a lot of work) to give just enough extra open sets that one can get reasonable cohomology groups for some constant coefficients, in particular for coefficients Z/nZ when n is coprime to the characteristic of the field one is working over.