Ultraproducts of Tannakian Categories and Generic Representation Theory of Unipotent Algebraic Groups

Abstract

The principle of tannakian duality states that any neutral tannakian category is tensorially equivalent to the category Rep_k G of finite dimensional representations of some affine group scheme G and field k, and conversely. Originally motivated by an attempt to find a first-order explanation for generic cohomology of algebraic groups, we study neutral tannakian categories as abstract first-order structures and, in particular, ultraproducts of them. One of the main theorems of this dissertation is that certain naturally definable subcategories of these ultraproducts are themselves neutral tannakian categories, hence tensorially equivalent to Comod_A for some Hopf algebra A over a field k. We are able to give a fairly tidy description of the representing Hopf algebras of these categories, and explicitly compute them in several examples. For the second half of this dissertation we turn our attention to the representation theories of certain unipotent algebraic groups, namely the additive group G_a and the Heisenberg group H_1. The results we obtain for these groups in characteristic zero are not at all new or surprising, but in positive characteristic they perhaps are. In both cases we obtain that, for a given dimension n, if p is large enough with respect to n, all n-dimensional modules for these groups in characteristic p are given by commuting products of representations, with the constituent factors resembling representations of the same group in characteristic zero. We later use these results to extrapolate some generic cohomology results for these particular unipotent groups.