# Sheaf Description of G-Bundles

Now, among algebraic geometers, at least, it is well known that there is an equivalence between locally free O_X-modules of rank n and vector bundles of rank n. So, equivalently, principal GL(n,C)-bundles are given by locally free sheaves of rank n.

So...what about other groups? I guess that SL(n,C) bundles are then locally free sheaves of rank n with top exterior power trivial, but can we phrase everything in terms of the properties of a sheaf and a group?

My guess is that in this context, if we can do it, we'll end up with something that's not quite locally free sheaves of rank n for GL(n,C), but which will be equivalent.

Note: I'm aware that we could just say something like "the sheaf of local sections of a G-bundle" but I'm looking for something intrinsic, a set of properties of the sheaf without reference to the geometric bundle, which can be reconstructed from the sheaf description.

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Principal GL(n)-bundles are equivalent to locally free sheaves of rank n, but not in the way you're describing. The easiest way to see this is to note that principal G-bundles have fibers that look like G (in the case of GL(n), these would be n²-dimensional), but locally free sheaves of rank n have n-dimensional fibers.

The way you get a locally free sheaf of rank n from a GL(n)-torsor P is by twisting the trivial rank n bundle On (which has a natural GL(n)-action) by the torsor. Explicitly, the locally free sheaf is F=OnxGL(n)P, whose (scheme-theoretic) points are (v,p), where v is a point of the trivial bundle and p is a point of P, subject to the relation that (v⋅g,p)∼(v,g⋅p). It happens that the map is bijective. Given a locally free sheaf F of rank n, the automorphism sheaf Aut(F) is a GL(n) torsor (and this procedure is inverse to the one I described).

Similarly, if you have a group G and a representation V, then you can associate to any G-torsor a locally free sheaf of rank dim(V). I don't know of a characterization of which locally free sheaves of rank dim(V) arise in this way.

Operations with the locally free sheaf (like taking top exterior power) should just correspond to doing that operation with the representation V, so I think you're right that in the case of SL(n) you get exactly those locally free sheaves whose top exterior power is trivial (since SL(n) has no non-trivial 1-dimensional representations).

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This is the closest to the sort of thing I was looking for. Since asking, I realized that there was an obvious description that was what I was looking for, for any fiber bundle with fiber F, a locally trivial F-bundle should be (it's in my scratch notebook, not fully proved but should work) equivalent to a sheaf of sets locally isomorphic to sheaf Hom(X,F). This recovers the equivalence for vector bundles, and does about what I want for G-bundles. –  Charles Siegel Oct 25 '09 at 16:00

If G is an affine algebraic group, a G-bundle is the same as a monoidal functor from G-reps to coherent sheaves. The map one way is take associated bundle, the other involves reconstructing the structure sheaf of the G-bundle from the associated ones. Roughly, you think of the functions on the group as a ring ind-object in the category of representations, and take the corresponding ring object in quasi-coherent sheaves. The Spec of this sheaf of rings is the G-bundle.

For GL(n), you'e lucky, since its category has a simple description: it's (basically) the free monoidal category with a single generator of dimension n. Other groups are a little more complicated, but not much worse.

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By the way, do you know a good reference for the reconstruction result? –  S. Carnahan Oct 25 '09 at 16:06
Denis Gaitsgory, personal communication. –  Ben Webster Oct 25 '09 at 18:12
math.harvard.edu/~gaitsgde/grad_2009/SeminarNotes/… are some of Gaitsgory's notes that cover this construction (although in the notes the functor takes values in vector bundles, not coherent sheaves). –  Dinakar Muthiah Oct 25 '09 at 22:28