Reflective and coreflective subcategories

TL;DR

This paper characterizes coreflective subcategories in additive categories with split idempotents, pseudokernels, and pseudocokernels, extending classical results to preabelian and pretriangulated categories and exploring applications in various categorical contexts.

Contribution

It provides new characterizations of coreflective subcategories in additive, preabelian, and pretriangulated categories, extending known results for abelian and triangulated categories.

Findings

Characterization of coreflective subcategories in preabelian categories

Extension of classical results to pretriangulated categories

Applications to Grothendieck and module categories

Abstract

Given any additive category $\mathcal{C}$ with split idempotents, pseudokernels and pseudocokernels, we show that a subcategory $\mathcal{B}$ is coreflective if, and only if, it is precovering, closed under direct summands and each morphism in $\mathcal{B}$ has a pseudocokernel in $\mathcal{C}$ that belongs to $\mathcal{B}$. We apply this result and its dual to, among others, preabelian and pretriangulated categories. As a consequence, we show that a subcategory of a preabelian category is coreflective if, and only it, it is precovering and closed under taking cokernels. On the other hand, if $\mathcal{C}$ is pretriangulated with split idempotents, then a subcategory $\mathcal{B}$ is coreflective and invariant under the suspension functor if, and only if, it is precovering and closed under taking direct summands and cones. These are extensions of well-known results for AB3 abelian and triangulated categories, respectively. By-side applications of these results allow us: a) To characterize the coreflective subcategories of a given AB3 abelian category which have a set of generators and are themselves abelian, abelian exact or module categories; b) to extend to module categories over arbitrary small preadditive categories a result of Gabriel and De la Pe\~na stating that all fully exact subcategories are bireflective; c) to show that, in any Grothendieck category, the direct limit closure of its subcategory of finitely presented objects is a coreflective subcategory.