Cohomological criterion for affineness 2026-10-06
A Noetherian scheme is affine exactly when every coherent ideal sheaf has zero first sheaf cohomology. One direction is vanishing of quasi-coherent cohomology on an affine scheme. For the converse, ideal-sheaf vanishing produces affine principal neighbourhoods from ideal-sheaf vanishing. A finite such cover yields a unit-ideal certificate from a principal affine cover, and those affine charts glue to the spectrum of a commutative ring of global sections. The criterion, including the finite-type ideal version for quasi-compact quasi-separated schemes, is recorded in Stacks Project, Section 30.3.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 16 2 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
The quasi-compactness of gives a finite cover by the affine principal neighbourhoods constructed above. Because at every point some is a unit in the local ring, the map of coherent sheavesis surjective. Its kernel is a coherent submodule of the trivial bundle, so by part (a). The long exact sequence in sheaf cohomology makes the map on global sections surjective. Lifting suppliesThis is the unit-ideal certificate from a principal affine cover.