K-Theory 15: 201–252, 1998. 201 © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Spaces over a Category and Assembly Maps in Isomorphism Conjectures in K- and L-Theory JAMES F. DAVIS?1 and WOLFGANG LUCK¨ 2 1Department of Mathematics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, U.S.A. e-mail:
[email protected] 2 Institut fur¨ Mathematik, Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universtitaet, 48149 Muenster, Germany e-mail:
[email protected] (Received: April 1997) Abstract. We give a unified approach to the Isomorphism Conjecture of Farrell and Jones on the algebraic K- and L-theory of integral group rings and to the Baum–Connes Conjecture on the topological K-theory of reduced C∗-algebras of groups. The approach is through spectra over the orbit category of a discrete group G. We give several points of view on the assembly map for a family of subgroups and characterize such assembly maps by a universal property generalizing the results of Weiss and Williams to the equivariant setting. The main tools are spaces and spectra over a category and their associated generalized homology and cohomology theories, and homotopy limits. Mathematics Subject Classification (1991). 57-XX. Key words: Algebraic K- and L-theory, Baum–Connes Conjecture, assembly maps, spaces and spectra over a category. 0. Introduction Glen Bredon [5] introduced the orbit category Or(G) of a group G. Objects are homogeneous spaces G/H , considered as left G-sets, and morphisms are G-maps. This is a useful construct for organizing the study of fixed sets and quotients of G- actions. If G acts on a set X, there is the contravariant fixed point functor Or(G) −→ H SETS given by G/H 7→ X = mapG(G/H, X) and the covariant quotient space functor Or(G) −→ SETS given by G/H 7→ X/H = X ×G G/H .