Intersections, sums, and the Jordan-Hölder property for exact categories

Abstract

We investigate how the concepts of intersection and sums of subobjects carry to exact categories. We obtain a new characterisation of quasi-abelian categories in terms of admitting admissible intersections in the sense of [23] . There are also many alternative characterisations of abelian categories as those that additionally admit admissible sums and in terms of properties of admissible morphisms . We then define a generalised notion of intersection and sum which every exact category admits. Using these new notions, we define and study classes of exact categories that satisfy the Jordan-Hölder property for exact categories, namely the Diamond exact categories and Artin-Wedderburn exact categories. By explicitly describing all exact structures on A = rep Λ for a Nakayama algebra Λ we characterise all Artin-Wedderburn exact structures on A and show that these are precisely the exact structures with the Jordan-Hölder property.