We extend the results of Deligne and Illusie on liftings modulo
and
decompositions of the de Rham complex in several ways. We show that for a smooth scheme
over a
perfect field
of
characteristic , the truncations
of the de Rham complex in
consecutive degrees can be reconstructed as objects of the derived category in terms of its
truncation in degrees at most one (or, equivalently, in terms the obstruction class to lifting
modulo
).
Consequently, these truncations are decomposable if
admits a
lifting to
, in
which case the first nonzero differential in the conjugate spectral sequence appears no earlier
than on page
(these corollaries have been recently strengthened by Drinfeld, by Bhatt and Lurie,
and by Li and Mondal). Without assuming the existence of a lifting, we describe
the gerbes of splittings of two-term truncations and the differentials on the
second page of the conjugate spectral sequence, answering a question of
Katz.
The main technical result used in the case
belongs purely to homological algebra. It concerns certain commutative differential
graded algebras whose cohomology algebra is the exterior algebra, dubbed by us
abstract Koszul complexes, of which the de Rham complex in characteristic
is an
example.
In the Appendix, we use the aforementioned stronger decomposition result to prove
that Kodaira–Akizuki–Nakano vanishing and Hodge–de Rham degeneration both hold
for
-split
-folds.