Representation Dimension as a Relative Homological Invariant of Stable Equivalence

Over an Artin algebra Λ many standard concepts from homological algebra can be relativized with respect to a contravariantly finite subcategory C of mod-Λ, which contains the projective modules. The main aim of this article is to prove that the resulting relative homological dimensions of modules are preserved by stable equivalences between Artin algebras. As a corollary, we see that Auslander’s notion of representation dimension is invariant under stable equivalence (a result recently obtained independently by Guo). We then apply these results to the syzygy functor for self-injective algebras of representation dimension three, where we bound the number of simple modules in terms of the number of indecomposable nonprojective summands of an Auslander generator.