Duality and nearby cycles over general bases

This paper studies the sliced nearby cycle functor and its commutation with duality. Over a Henselian discrete valuation ring, we show that this commutation holds, confirming a prediction of Deligne. As an application we give a new proof of Beilinson's theorem that the vanishing cycle functor commutes with duality up to twist. Over an excellent base scheme, we show that the sliced nearby cycle functor commutes with duality up to modification of the base. We deduce that duality preserves universal local acyclicity over an excellent regular base. We also present Gabber's theorem that local acyclicity implies universal local acyclicity over a Noetherian base.