Profinite descent for Picard groups

Seminar talk notes

For the spring 2024 edition of our Freudenthal Topology Seminar, I recently gave a talk about parts of Itamar Mor’s thesis on profinite descent methods for computing the Picard group of $K(n)$-local spectra. You can find the notes below.

His thesis covers more than what I had time to talk about, and I could only cover the overall ideas, rather than dive into the actual proofs. Nevertheless, I hope that these notes are helpful as an introduction to descent methods for Picard groups in general, as well as a first start on the profinite version. To facilitate this, I have included a number of references throughout for those who want to delve deeper into this topic.