Dualizing spheres for compact p-adic analytic groups and duality in chromatic homotopy

Abstract

The primary goal of this paper is to study Spanier–Whitehead duality in the K(n)-local category. One of the key players in the K(n)-local category is the Lubin–Tate spectrum \(E_n\), whose homotopy groups classify deformations of a formal group law of height n, in the implicit characteristic p. It is known that \(E_n\) is self-dual up to a shift; however, that does not fully take into account the action of the automorphism group \({\mathbb {G}}_n\) of the formal group in question. In this paper we find that the \({\mathbb {G}}_n\)-equivariant dual of \(E_n\) is in fact \(E_n\) twisted by a sphere with a non-trivial (when \(n>1\)) action by \({\mathbb {G}}_n\). This sphere is a dualizing module for the group \({\mathbb {G}}_n\), and we construct and study such an object \(I_{{\mathcal {G}}}\) for any compact p-adic analytic group \({\mathcal {G}}\). If we restrict the action of \({\mathcal {G}}\) on \(I_{{\mathcal {G}}}\) to certain type of small subgroups, we identify \(I_{{\mathcal {G}}}\) with a specific representation sphere coming from the Lie algebra of \({\mathcal {G}}\). This is done by a classification of p-complete sphere spectra with an action by an elementary abelian p-group in terms of characteristic classes, and then a specific comparison of the characteristic classes in question. The setup makes the theory quite accessible for computations, as we demonstrate in the later sections of this paper, determining the K(n)-local Spanier–Whitehead duals of \(E_n^{hH}\) for select choices of p and n and finite subgroups H of \({\mathbb {G}}_n\).