A Universal HKR Theorem

Abstract: In this work we study the failure of the HKR theorem over rings of positive and mixed characteristic. For this we construct a filtered circle interpolating between the usual topological circle and a formal version of it. By mapping to schemes we produce this way an interpolation, realized in practice by the existence of a natural filtration, from Hochschild and (a filtered version of) cyclic homology to derived de Rham cohomology. In particular, we show that this recovers the filtration of Antieau and Bhatt-Morrow-Scholze. The construction of our filtered circle is based on the theory of affine stacks and affinization introduced by the third author, together with some facts about schemes of Witt vectors.