THE GORENSTEIN DEFECT CATEGORY

We consider the homotopy category of complexes of projective modules over a Noetherian ring. Truncation at degree zero induces a fully faithful triangle functor from the totally acyclic complexes to the singularity category. We show that if the ring is either Artin or commutative Noetherian local, then the functor is dense if and only if the ring is Gorenstein. Motivated by this, we define the Gorenstein defect category of the ring, a category which in some sense measures how far the ring is from being Gorenstein.