In mathematics, a Dieudonné module introduced by Jean Dieudonné (1954, 1957b), is a module over the non-commutative Dieudonné ring, which is generated over the ring of Witt vectors by two special endomorphisms
called the Frobenius and Verschiebung operators.
They are used for studying finite flat commutative group schemes.
Finite flat commutative group schemes over a perfect field
can be studied by transferring their geometric structure to a (semi-)linear-algebraic setting.
The basic object is the Dieudonné ring which is a quotient of the ring of noncommutative polynomials, with coefficients in Witt vectors of
are the Frobenius and Verschiebung operators, and they may act nontrivially on the Witt vectors.
Dieudonné and Pierre Cartier constructed an antiequivalence of categories between finite commutative group schemes over
The Dieudonné module functor in one direction is given by homomorphisms into the abelian sheaf
This sheaf is more or less dual to the sheaf of Witt vectors (which is in fact representable by a group scheme), since it is constructed by taking a direct limit of finite length Witt vectors under successive Verschiebung maps
Many properties of commutative group schemes can be seen by examining the corresponding Dieudonné modules, e.g., connected
is nilpotent, and étale group schemes correspond to modules for which
Dieudonné theory exists in a somewhat more general setting than finite flat groups over a field.
Tadao Oda's 1967 thesis gave a connection between Dieudonné modules and the first de Rham cohomology of abelian varieties, and at about the same time, Alexander Grothendieck suggested that there should be a crystalline version of the theory that could be used to analyze
Galois actions on the group schemes transfer through the equivalences of categories, and the associated deformation theory of Galois representations was used in Andrew Wiles's work on the Shimura–Taniyama conjecture.
is a perfect field of characteristic
, its ring of Witt vectors consists of sequences
induced by the Frobenius endomorphism of
The Dieudonné ring, often denoted by
Some authors define the Dieudonné ring to be the completion of the ring above for the ideal generated by
Special sorts of modules over the Dieudonné ring correspond to certain algebraic group schemes.
For example, finite length modules over the Dieudonné ring form an abelian category equivalent to the opposite of the category of finite commutative
The Dieudonné–Manin classification theorem was proved by Dieudonné (1955) and Yuri Manin (1963).
It describes the structure of Dieudonné modules over an algebraically closed field
More precisely, it classifies the finitely generated modules over
is a commutative group scheme, its Dieudonné module
is the formal Witt group scheme and
The Dieudonné module gives antiequivalences between various sorts of commutative group schemes and left modules over the Dieudonné ring
Dieudonné crystals were introduced by Grothendieck (1966).
They play the same role for classifying algebraic groups over schemes that Dieudonné modules play for classifying algebraic groups over fields.