The Eigenvalue Spectrum of the Inertia Operator

We view the inertia construction of algebraic stacks as an operator on the Grothendieck groups of various categories of algebraic stacks. We show that the inertia operator is locally finite and diagonalizable. This is proved for the Grothendieck group of Deligne-Mumford stacks over a base scheme and the category of quasi-split Artin stacks defined over a field of characteristic zero. Motivated by the quasi-splitness condition, in [2] we consider the inertia operator of the Hall algebra of algebroids, and applications of it in generalized Donaldson-Thomas theory.