Extra-fine sheaves and interaction decompositions

Abstract

We introduce an original notion of extra-fine sheaf on a topological space, and a variant (hyper-extra-fine) for which \v{C}ech cohomology in strictly positive degree vanishes. We provide a characterization of such sheaves when the topological space is a partially ordered set (poset) equipped with the Alexandrov topology. Then we further specialize our results to some sheaves of vector spaces and injective maps, where extra-fineness is (essentially) equivalent to the decomposition of the sheaf into a direct sum of subfunctors, known as interaction decomposition, and can be expressed by a sum-intersection condition. We use these results to compute the dimension of the space of global sections when the presheaves are freely generated over a functor of sets, generalizing classical counting formulae for the number of solutions of the linearized marginal problem (Kellerer and Mat\'u\v{s}). We finish with a comparison theorem between the \v{C}ech cohomology associated to a covering and the topos cohomology of the poset with coefficients in the presheaf, which is also the cohomology of a cosimplicial local system over the nerve of the poset. For that, we give a detailed treatment of cosimplicial local systems on simplicial sets. The appendixes present presheaves, sheaves and \v{C}ech cohomology, and their application to the marginal problem.