Auslander-Reiten triangles and Grothendieck groups of triangulated categories

Abstract: We prove that if the Auslander-Reiten triangles generate the relations for the Grothendieck group of a Hom-finite Krull-Schmidt triangulated category with a (co)generator, then the category has only finitely many isomorphism classes of indecomposable objects up to translation. This gives a triangulated converse to a theorem of Butler and Auslander-Reiten on the relations for Grothendieck groups. Our approach has applications in the context of Frobenius categories.