Prismatic decompositions and rational $G$-spectra

Abstract

We study the tensor-triangular geometry of the category of rational $G$-spectra for a compact Lie group $G$. In particular, we prove that this category can be naturally decomposed into local factors supported on individual subgroups, each of which admits an algebraic model. This is an important step and strong evidence towards the third author's conjecture that the category of rational $G$-spectra admits an algebraic model for all compact Lie groups. To facilitate these results, we relate topological properties of the associated Balmer spectrum to structural features of the group $G$ and the category of rational $G$-spectra. A key ingredient is our presentation of the spectrum as a Priestley space, separating the Hausdorff topology on conjugacy classes of closed subgroups of $G$ from the cotoral ordering. We use this to prove that the telescope conjecture holds in general for rational $G$-spectra, and we determine exactly when the Balmer spectrum is Noetherian. In order to construct the desired decomposition of the category, we develop a general theory of `prismatic decompositions' of rigidly-compactly generated tensor-triangulated categories, which in favourable cases gives a series of recollements for reconstructing the category from local factors over individual points of the spectrum.