Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2010
We study cocoverings of triangulated categories, in the sense of Rouquier, and prove that for any regular cardinal α the condition of α-compactness, in the sense of Neeman, is local with respect to such cocoverings. This was established for ordinary compactness by Rouquier. Our result yields a new technique for proving that a given triangulated category is well-generated. As an application we describe the α-compact objects in the unbounded derived category of a quasi-compact and semi-separated scheme.