We study internal structures in regular categories using monoidal methods. Groupoids in a regular Goursat category can equivalently be described as special dagger Frobenius monoids in its monoidal category of relations. Similarly, connectors can equivalently be described as Frobenius structures with a ternary multiplication. We study such ternary Frobenius structures and the relationship to binary ones, generalising that between connectors and groupoids.
In this paper, we show another proof of the problem by constructing a strict monoidal category M(C) consisting of M-functors and M-morphisms of a category C and we prove C is equivalent to it. The proof is based on a basic character of monoidal equivalences. Ideas and techniques of these proofs can been used to prove the equivalence between an Ann-category and an almost strict Ann-category.
Bergman has given the following abstract characterisation of the inner automorphisms of a group $G$: they are exactly those automorphisms of $G$ which can be extended functorially along any homomorphism $G rightarrow H$ to an automorphism of $H$. This leads naturally to a definition of inner automorphism applicable to the objects of any category. Bergman and Hofstra--Parker--Scott have computed these inner automorphisms for various structures including $k$-algebras, monoids, lattices, unital rings, and quandles---showing that, in each case, they are given by an obvious notion of conjugation. In this note, we compute the inner automorphisms of groupoids, showing that they are exactly the automorphisms induced by conjugation by a bisection. The twist is that this result is false in the category of groupoids and homomorphisms; to make it true, we must instead work with the less familiar category of groupoids and comorphisms in the sense of Higgins and Mackenzie. Besides our main result, we also discuss generalisations to topological and Lie groupoids, to categories and to partial automorphisms, and examine the link with the theory of inverse semigroups.
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 Bobs causal future.
In this paper, we introduce the notion of a topological groupoid extension and relate it to the already existing notion of a gerbe over a topological stack. We further study the properties of a gerbe over a Serre, Hurewicz stack.
We introduce homotopical methods based on rewriting on higher-dimensional categories to prove coherence results in categories with an algebraic structure. We express the coherence problem for (symmetric) monoidal categories as an asphericity problem for a track category and we use rewriting methods on polygraphs to solve it. The setting is extended to more general coherence problems, seen as 3-dimensional word problems in a track category, including the case of braided monoidal categories.