Hereditary noetherian categories of positive Euler characteristic

Abstract

We develop the fundamentals of hereditary noetherian categories with Serre duality over an arbitrary field k, where the category of coherent sheaves over a smooth projective curve over k serves as the prime example and others are coming from the representation theory of finite dimensional algebras. The proper way to view such a category is to think of coherent sheaves on a possibly non-commutative smooth projective curve. We define for each such category notions like function field and Euler characteristic, determine its Auslander-Reiten components and study stable and semistable bundles for an appropriate notion of degree. We provide a complete classification of hereditary noetherian categories for the case of positive Euler characteristic by relating these to finite dimensional representations of (locally bounded) hereditary k-algebras whose underlying valued quiver admits a positive additive function.