Torsion and Ortho-Slender Classes

This paper generalizes a number of results obtained by Dimitrić in (Glas. Mat. 21(41):327–329, 1986; Proceedings of Hobart Conference on Rings, Modules and Radicals 1987, 204:41–50, Gordon and Breach, 1989) and Dimitrić and Goldsmith in (Glas. Mat. 23(43):241–246, 1988). The original papers were restricted to the category of Abelian groups and orthogonality was to the group of integers ℤ. Here, we are in a general Abelian category with products and coproducts, with applications to module categories and further to modules over PID’s. Another generalization is in replacing ℤ by an entire class of subobjects of the underlying category. We examine properties of the torsion class , Hom(T,C)=0} in relation to purity, direct summands and indecomposability as well as commutation with direct products, for example. Of special interest are members of this class when is a class of slender objects in the ground category; in this case, members of are called ortho-slender objects. In a sense, ortho-slenderness represents complementary, if not dual, notion to slenderness.