For a smooth Deligne–Mumford stack
,
we describe a large number of
inertial products on
and
and
inertial Chern characters. We do this by developing a theory of
inertial pairs. Each inertial pair determines an inertial product on
and an inertial
product on
and Chern character ring homomorphisms between them. We show
that there are many inertial pairs; indeed, every vector bundle
on
defines two new inertial pairs. We recover, as special cases, the orbifold products
considered by Chen and Ruan (2004), Abramovich, Graber and Vistoli (2002),
Fantechi and Göttsche (2003), Jarvis, Kaufmann and Kimura (2007) and by the
authors (2010), and the virtual product of González, Lupercio, Segovia, Uribe and
Xicoténcatl (2007).
We also introduce an entirely new product we call the
localized orbifold product, which is
defined on
.
The inertial products developed in this paper are used in a subsequent paper to
describe a theory of inertial Chern classes and power operations in inertial
-theory.
These constructions provide new manifestations of mirror symmetry, in the spirit of
the hyper-Kähler resolution conjecture.