The left heart and exact hull of an additive regular category

Abstract

Quasi-abelian categories are abundant in functional analysis and representation theory. It is known that a quasi-abelian category $\mathcal{E}$ is a cotilting torsionfree class of an abelian category. In fact, this property characterizes quasi-abelian categories. This ambient abelian category is derived equivalent to the category $\mathcal{E}$, and can be constructed as the heart $\mathcal{L}\mathcal{H}(\mathcal{E})$ of a $t$-structure on the bounded derived category ${\mathrm{D}}^{\mathrm{b}}(\mathcal{E})$ or as the localization of the category of monomorphisms in $\mathcal{E}.$ However, there are natural examples of categories in functional analysis which are not quasi-abelian, but merely one-sided quasi-abelian or even weaker. Examples are the category of $\mathrm{LB}$-spaces or the category of complete Hausdorff locally convex spaces. In this paper, we consider additive regular categories as a generalization of quasi-abelian categories that covers the aforementioned examples. Additive regular categories can be characterized as those subcategories of abelian categories which are closed under subobjects. As for quasi-abelian categories, we show that such an ambient abelian category of an additive regular category $\mathcal{E}$ can be found as the heart of a $t$-structure on the bounded derived category ${\mathrm{D}}^{\mathrm{b}}(\mathcal{E})$, or as the localization of the category of monomorphisms of $\mathcal{E}$. In our proof of this last construction, we formulate and prove a version of Auslander's formula for additive regular categories. Whereas a quasi-abelian category is an exact category in a natural way, an additive regular category has a natural one-sided exact structure. Such a one-sided exact category can be 2-universally embedded into its exact hull. We show that the exact hull of an additive regular category is again an additive regular category.