No Arabic abstract
We extend the big and $p$-typical Witt vector functors from commutative rings to commutative semirings. In the case of the big Witt vectors, this is a repackaging of some standard facts about monomial and Schur positivity in the combinatorics of symmetric functions. In the $p$-typical case, it uses positivity with respect to an apparently new basis of the $p$-typical symmetric functions. We also give explicit descriptions of the big Witt vectors of the natural numbers and of the nonnegative reals, the second of which is a restatement of Edreis theorem on totally positive power series. Finally we give some negative results on the relationship between truncated Witt vectors and $k$-Schur positivity, and we give ten open questions.
This is an account of the algebraic geometry of Witt vectors and arithmetic jet spaces. The usual, p-typical Witt vectors of p-adic schemes of finite type are already reasonably well understood. The main point here is to generalize this theory in two ways. We allow not just p-typical Witt vectors but those taken with respect to any set of primes in any ring of integers in any global field, for example. This includes the big Witt vectors. We also allow not just p-adic schemes of finite type but arbitrary algebraic spaces over the ring of integers in the global field. We give similar generalizations of Buiums formal arithmetic jet functor, which is dual to the Witt functor. We also give concrete geometric descriptions of Witt spaces and arithmetic jet spaces and investigate whether a number of standard geometric properties are preserved by these functors.
A subtraction-free definition of the big Witt vector construction was recently given by the first author. This allows one to define the big Witt vectors of any semiring. Here we give an explicit combinatorial description of the big Witt vectors of the Boolean semiring. We do the same for two variants of the big Witt vector construction: the Schur Witt vectors and the $p$-typical Witt vectors. We use this to give an explicit description of the Schur Witt vectors of the natural numbers, which can be viewed as the classification of totally positive power series with integral coefficients, first obtained by Davydov. We also determine the cardinalities of some Witt vector algebras with entries in various concrete arithmetic semirings.
We give a concrete description of the category of etale algebras over the ring of Witt vectors of a given finite length with entries in an arbitrary ring. We do this not only for the classical p-typical and big Witt vector functors but also for variants of these functors which are in a certain sense their analogues over arbitrary local and global fields. The basic theory of these generalized Witt vectors is developed from the point of view of commuting Frobenius lifts and their universal properties, which is a new approach even for the classical Witt vectors. The larger purpose of this paper is to provide the affine foundations for the algebraic geometry of generalized Witt schemes and arithmetic jet spaces. So the basics here are developed somewhat fully, with an eye toward future applications.
We give a $K$-theoretic account of the basic properties of Witt vectors. Along the way we re-prove basic properties of the little-known Witt vector norm, give a characterization of Witt vectors in terms of algebraic $K$-theory, and a presentation of the Witt vectors that is useful for computation.
We prove that the only entrywise transforms of rectangular matrices which preserve total positivity or total non-negativity are either constant or linear. This follows from an extended classification of preservers of these two properties for matrices of fixed dimension. We also prove that the same assertions hold upon working only with symmetric matrices; for total-positivity preservers our proofs proceed through solving two totally positive completion problems.