Building Pretorsion Theories from Torsion Theories

Abstract Torsion theories play an important role in abelian categories and they have been widely studied in the last sixty years. In recent years, with the introduction of pretorsion theories, the definition has been extended to general (non-pointed) categories. Many examples have been investigated in several different contexts, such as topological spaces and topological groups, internal preorders, preordered groups, toposes, V-groups, crossed modules, etc. In this paper, we show that pretorsion theories naturally appear also in the “classical” framework, namely in abelian categories. We propose two ways of obtaining pretorsion theories starting from torsion theories. The first one uses “comparable” torsion theories, while the second one extends a torsion theory with a Serre subcategory. We also give a universal way of obtaining a torsion theory from a given pretorsion theory in additive categories. We conclude by providing several examples in module categories, internal groupoids, recollements and representation theory.