The direct image of a coherent sheaf under a closed immersion puts in the category of coherent sheaves on . By sheaf cohomology under a closed inclusion and the supplied compatibility of twisting with direct image,
Here is a proof of the required Serre vanishing on projective space. A coherent sheaf on is the sheaf associated with a graded module for a finite graded -module. Equivalently, it has a presentation by finite sums of twisting sheaves. Use a finite twisting resolution of a coherent sheaf on projective space: resolve the graded module by a finite graded free resolution, using the Hilbert syzygy theorem, and sheafify; exactness of localization preserves the resolution. Its terms are finite sums of .
Choose sufficiently large that all twists occurring in these finitely many terms are nonnegative. The cohomology of twisting sheaves on projective space then vanishes in every positive degree for every resolution term. In a short exact sequence , with , the long exact sequence in sheaf cohomology identifies with for . Iterating to the final acyclic term proves
The standard graded-module description used here is given in Stacks Project, Section 30.15; the vanishing follows from the displayed finite-resolution argument.
An -module is a quasi-coherent sheaf when every affine open has for some -module . For a morphism , its direct image sheaf is
while the pullback of a sheaf of modules is
If is a closed immersion of Noetherian schemes, then on an affine open one has . The restriction of corresponds to the cyclic -module , so it is finitely generated. Hence is a coherent sheaf; more generally this is the direct image of a coherent sheaf under a closed immersion.
Coherence need not survive an arbitrary pushforward. Let
be the open immersion. The sheaf is coherent, but
is not a finitely generated -module. Therefore is not coherent.