We study the classes of modules which are generated by a silting module. In the case of either hereditary or perfect rings, it is proved that these are exactly the torsion T such that the regular module has a special T-preenvelope. In particular, every torsion-enveloping class in Mod-R are of the form Gen(T) for a minimal silting module T. For the dual case, we obtain for general rings that the covering torsion-free classes of modules are exactly the classes of the form Cogen(T), where T is a cosilting module.

Let $D$ be a Dedekind scheme with the characteristic of all residue fields not equal to 2. To every tame cover $C\to D$ with only odd ramification we associate a second Stiefel-Whitney class in the second cohomology with mod 2 coefficients of a certain tame orbicurve $[D]$ associated to $D$ . This class is then related to the pull-back of the second Stiefel-Whitney class of the push-forward of the line bundle of half of the ramification divisor. This shows (indirectly) that our Stiefel-Whitney class is the pull-back of a sum of cohomology classes considered by Esnault, Kahn and Viehweg in ‘Coverings with odd ramification and Stiefel-Whitney classes’. Perhaps more importantly, in the case of a proper and smooth curve over an algebraically closed field, our Stiefel-Whitney class is shown to be the pull-back of an invariant considered by Serre in ‘Revêtements à ramification impaire et thêta-caractéristiques’, and in this case our arguments give a new proof of the main result of that article.

Topological cyclic homology is a refinement of Connes–Tsygan’s cyclic homology which was introduced by Bökstedt–Hsiang–Madsen in 1993 as an approximation to algebraic K-theory. There is a trace map from algebraic K-theory to topological cyclic homology, and a theorem of Dundas–Goodwillie–McCarthy asserts that this induces an equivalence of relative theories for nilpotent immersions, which gives a way for computing K-theory in various situations. The construction of topological cyclic homology is based on genuine equivariant homotopy theory, the use of explicit point-set models, and the elaborate notion of a cyclotomic spectrum. The goal of this paper is to revisit this theory using only homotopy-invariant notions. In particular, we give a new construction of topological cyclic homology. This is based on a new definition of the ∞-category of cyclotomic spectra: We define a cyclotomic spectrum to be a spectrum X with S1-action (in the most naive sense) together with S1-equivariant maps φp:X→XtCp for all primes p. Here, XtCp=cofib(Nm:XhCp→XhCp) is the Tate construction. On bounded below spectra, we prove that this agrees with previous definitions. As a consequence, we obtain a new and simple formula for topological cyclic homology. In order to construct the maps φp:X→XtCp in the example of topological Hochschild homology, we introduce and study Tate-diagonals for spectra and Frobenius homomorphisms of commutative ring spectra. In particular, we prove a version of the Segal conjecture for the Tate-diagonals and relate these Frobenius homomorphisms to power operations.