Revisiting the de Rham-Witt complex

The goal of this paper is to offer a new construction of the de Rham-Witt complex of smooth varieties over perfect fields of characteristic $p$. We introduce a category of cochain complexes equipped with an endomorphism $F$ (of underlying graded abelian groups) satisfying $dF = pFd$, whose homological algebra we study in detail. To any such object satisfying an abstract analog of the Cartier isomorphism, an elementary homological process associates a generalization of the de Rham-Witt construction. Abstractly, the homological algebra can be viewed as a calculation of the fixed points of the Berthelot-Ogus operator $L \eta_p$ on the $p$-complete derived category. We give various applications of this approach, including a simplification of the crystalline comparison in $A \Omega$-cohomology theory.