Cell spectrum

A cell spectrum is obtained by attaching stable cells, with successive cofibers of spectra wedges of suspensions of spectra of the sphere spectrum. Cellular models provide the cofibrant objects needed to compute derived maps of topological spectra. Stable cells may occur in arbitrary integer degrees.

A finite spectrum is a topological spectrum equivalent to a cell spectrum with finitely many cells. Such an object is compact in the stable homotopy category and has a Spanier-Whitehead dual. Compactness means maps out of it commute with filtered homotopy colimits of spectra.

The Spanier-Whitehead dual of a finite spectrum $A$ is $A^{\vee }=F(A,\mathbb{S})$. It is finite, and evaluation and coevaluation give the natural Spanier-Whitehead duality adjunction.

For a finite spectrum $A$, evaluation and coevaluation identify $[B,D\wedge A{]}_{\mathrm{st}}$ with $[B\wedge A^{\vee },D{]}_{\mathrm{st}}$. Cellular induction constructs the dual from the duals of stable cells and verifies these identities across cofiber sequences of spectra. In particular ${\pi }_k(D\wedge A)=[{\Sigma }^k{A}^{\vee },D{]}_{\mathrm{st}}$.