The category of Hilbert modules may be interpreted as a naive quantum field theory over a base space. Open subsets of the base space are recovered as idempotent subunits, which form a meet-semilattice in any firm braided monoidal category. There is an operation of restriction to an idempotent subunit: it is a graded monad on the category, and has the universal property of algebraic localisation. Spacetime structure on the base space induces a closure operator on the idempotent subunits. Restriction is then interpreted as spacetime propagation. This lets us study relativistic quantum information theory using methods entirely internal to monoidal categories. As a proof of concept, we show that quantum teleportation is only successfully supported on the intersection of Alice and Bob's causal future.
The skew monoidal categories of Szlachányi are a weakening of monoidal categories where the three structural laws of left and right unitality and associativity are not required to be isomorphisms but merely transformations in a particular direction. In previous work, we showed that the free skew monoidal category on a set of generating objects can be concretely presented as a sequent calculus. This calculus enjoys cut elimination and admits focusing, i.e. a subsystem of canonical derivations, which solves the coherence problem for skew monoidal categories. In this paper, we develop sequent cal…
We investigate monoidal categories of formal contexts, in which states correspond to formal concepts. In particular we examine the category of bonds or Chu correspondences between contexts, which is known to be equivalent to the *-autonomous category of complete sup-lattices. We show that a second monoidal structure exists on both categories, corresponding to the direct product of formal contexts defined by Ganter and Wille, and discuss the use of these categories as compositional models of meaning.
Cartesian reverse differential categories (CRDCs) are a recently defined structure which categorically model the reverse differentiation operations used in supervised learning. Here we define a related structure called a monoidal reverse differential category, prove important results about its relationship to CRDCs, and provide examples of both structures, including examples coming from models of quantum computation.
We discuss generalised duality theory for monoidal categories and its applications to the categories of exact endofunctors, graded vector spaces, and topological vector spaces.
Szlachányi's skew monoidal categories are a well-motivated variation of monoidal categories in which the unitors and associator are not required to be natural isomorphisms, but merely natural transformations in a particular direction. We present a sequent calculus for skew monoidal categories, building on the recent formulation by one of the authors of a sequent calculus for the Tamari order (skew semigroup categories). In this calculus, antecedents consist of a stoup (an optional formula) followed by a context, and the connectives behave like in the standard monoidal sequent calculus except t…
In this paper we construct a symmetric monoidal closed model category of coherently commutative monoidal categories. The main aim of this paper is to establish a Quillen equivalence between a model category of coherently commutative monoidal categories and a natural model category of Permutative (or strict symmetric monoidal) categories, $\mathbf{Perm}$, which is not a symmetric monoidal closed model category. The right adjoint of this Quillen equivalence is the classical Segal's Nerve functor.
We introduce monoidal width as a measure of complexity for morphisms in monoidal categories. Inspired by well-known structural width measures for graphs, like tree width and rank width, monoidal width is based on a notion of syntactic decomposition: a monoidal decomposition of a morphism is an expression in the language of monoidal categories, where operations are monoidal products and compositions, that specifies this morphism. Monoidal width penalises the composition operation along ``big'' objects, while it encourages the use of monoidal products. We show that, by choosing the correct categ…
In this paper we introduce a notion of $\mathbf{O}$-monoidal $\infty$-categories for a finite sequence $\mathbf{O}^{\otimes}$ of $\infty$-operads, which is a generalization of the notion of higher monoidal categories in the setting of $\infty$-categories. We show that the $\infty$-category of coCartesian $\mathbf{O}$-monoidal $\infty$-categories and right adjoint lax $\mathbf{O}$-monoidal functors is equivalent to the opposite of the $\infty$-category of Cartesian $\mathbf{O}_{\rm rev}$-monoidal $\infty$-categories and left adjoint oplax $\mathbf{O}_{\rm rev}$-monoidal functors, where $\mathbf…
We prove that a category which is symmetric (relaxed) monoidal closed, (small) complete, well-powered and has a small cogenerating family, is cocomplete.
Monoidal categories enriched in a braided monoidal category $\mathcal{V}$ are classified by braided oplax monoidal functors from $\mathcal{V}$ to the Drinfeld centers of ordinary monoidal categories. In this article, we prove that this classifying functor is strongly monoidal if and only if the original $\mathcal{V}$-monoidal category is tensored over $\mathcal{V}$. We then define a completion operation which produces a tensored $\mathcal{V}$-monoidal category $\overline{\mathcal{C}}$ from an arbitrary $\mathcal{V}$-monoidal category $\mathcal{C}$, and we determine many equivalent conditions w…
We construct an equivalence between the 2-categories VMonCat of rigid V-monoidal categories for a braided monoidal category V and VModTens of oplax braided functors from V into the Drinfeld centers of ordinary rigid monoidal categories. The 1-cells in each are the respective lax monoidal functors, and the 2-cells are the respective monoidal natural transformations. Our proof also gives an equivalence in the case that we consider only strong monoidal 1-cells on both sides. The 2-categories VMonCat and VModTens have G-graded analogues. We also get an equivalence of 2-categories between G-extensi…
We prove that the homotopy theory of parsummable categories (as defined by Schwede) with respect to the underlying equivalences of categories is equivalent to the usual homotopy theory of symmetric monoidal categories. In particular, this yields a model of symmetric monoidal categories in terms of categories equipped with a strictly commutative, associative, and unital (but only partially defined) operation.
We show that the word problem for braided monoidal categories is at least as hard as the unknotting problem. As a corollary, so is the word problem for Gray categories. We conjecture that the word problem for Gray categories is decidable.
We denote the monoidal bicategory of two-sided modules (also called profunctors, bimodules and distributors) between categories by $\mathrm{Mod}$; the tensor product is cartesian product of categories. For a groupoid $\scr{G}$, we study the monoidal centre $\mathrm{ZPs}(\scr{G},\mathrm{Mod}^{\mathrm{op}})$ of the monoidal bicategory $\mathrm{Ps}(\scr{G},\mathrm{Mod}^{\mathrm{op}})$ of pseudofunctors and pseudonatural transformations; the tensor product is pointwise. Alexei Davydov defined the full centre of a monoid in a monoidal category. We define a higher dimensional version: the full monoi…
The main objective of this paper is to construct a symmetric monoidal closed model category of coherently commutative monoidal quasi-categories. We construct another model category structure whose fibrant objects are (essentially) those coCartesian fibrations which represent objects that are known as symmetric monoidal quasi-categories in the literature. We go on to establish a Quillen equivalence between the two model categories.
We define a traced pseudomonoid as a pseudomonoid in a monoidal bicategory equipped with extra structure, giving a new characterisation of Cauchy complete traced monoidal categories as algebraic structures in Prof, the monoidal bicategory of profunctors. This enables reasoning about the trace using the graphical calculus for monoidal bicategories, which we illustrate in detail. We apply our techniques to study traced ∗-autonomous categories, proving a new equivalence result between the left ⊗-trace and the right ⅋-trace, and describing a new condition under which traced ͨ…
We lift the standard equivalence between fibrations and indexed categories to an equivalence between monoidal fibrations and monoidal indexed categories, namely weak monoidal pseudofunctors to the 2-category of categories. In doing so, we investigate the relation between this `global' monoidal structure where the total category is monoidal and the fibration strictly preserves the structure, and a `fibrewise' one where the fibres are monoidal and the reindexing functors strongly preserve the structure, first hinted by Shulman. In particular, when the domain is cocartesian monoidal, lax monoidal…
We use Lurie's symmetric monoidal envelope functor to give two new descriptions of $\infty$-operads: as certain symmetric monoidal $\infty$-categories whose underlying symmetric monoidal $\infty$-groupoids are free, and as certain symmetric monoidal $\infty$-categories equipped with a symmetric monoidal functor to finite sets (with disjoint union as tensor product). The latter leads to a third description of $\infty$-operads, as a localization of a presheaf $\infty$-category, and we use this to give a simple proof of the equivalence between Lurie's and Barwick's models for $\infty$-operads.
