Geometric Criteria for Landweber Exactness

The purpose of this paper is to give a new presentation of some of the main results concerning Landweber exactness in the context of the homotopy theory of stacks. We present two new criteria for Landweber exactness over a flat Hopf algebroid. The first criterion is used to classify stacks arising from Landweber exact maps of rings. Using as extra input only Lazard’s theorem and Cartier’s classification of p-typical formal group laws, this result is then applied to deduce many of the main results concerning Landweber exactness in stable homotopy theory and to compute the Bousfield classes of certain BP -algebra spectra. The second criterion can be regarded as a generalization of the Landweber exact functor theorem and we use it to give a proof of the original theorem.