Derived Functors of Differential Operators

Abstract

Abstract In their work on differential operators in positive characteristic, Smith and Van den Bergh define and study the derived functors of differential operators; these arise naturally as obstructions to differential operators reducing to positive characteristic. In this paper, we provide formulas for the ring of differential operators as well as these derived functors of differential operators. We apply these descriptions to show that differential operators behave well under reduction to positive characteristic under certain hypotheses. We show that these functors also detect a number of interesting properties of singularities.