We prove that a quasi-bialgebra admits a preantipode if and only if the associated free quasi-Hopf bimodule functor is Frobenius, if and only if the relative (opmonoidal) monad is a Hopf monad. The same results hold in particular for a bialgebra, tightening the connection between Hopf and Frobenius properties.
A fundamental theorem of P. Deligne (2002) states that a pre-Tannakian category over an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero admits a fiber functor to the category of supervector spaces (i.e., is the representation category of an affine proalgebraic supergroup) if and only if it has moderate growth (i.e., the lengths of tensor powers of an object grow at most exponentially). In this paper we prove a characteristic p version of this theorem. Namely we show that a pre-Tannakian category over an algebraically closed field of characteristic p>0 admits a fiber functor into the Verlinde category Ver_p (i.e., is the representation category of an affine group scheme in Ver_p) if and only if it has moderate growth and is Frobenius exact. This implies that Frobenius exact pre-Tannakian categories of moderate growth admit a well-behaved notion of Frobenius-Perron dimension. It follows that any semisimple pre-Tannakian category of moderate growth has a fiber functor to Ver_p (so in particular Delignes theorem holds on the nose for semisimple pre-Tannakian categories in characteristics 2,3). This settles a conjecture of the third author from 2015. In particular, this result applies to semisimplifications of categories of modular representations of finite groups (or, more generally, affine group schemes), which gives new applications to classical modular representation theory. For example, it allows us to characterize, for a modular representation V, the possible growth rates of the number of indecomposable summands in V^{otimes n} of dimension prime to p.
We study the higher Frobenius-Schur indicators of the representations of the Drinfeld double of a finite group G, in particular the question as to when all the indicators are integers. This turns out to be an interesting group-theoretic question. We show that many groups have this property, such as alternating and symmetric groups, PSL_2(q), M_{11}, M_{12} and regular nilpotent groups. However we show there is an irregular nilpotent group of order 5^6 with non-integer indicators.
We develop a theory of Frobenius functors for symmetric tensor categories (STC) $mathcal{C}$ over a field $bf k$ of characteristic $p$, and give its applications to classification of such categories. Namely, we define a twisted-linear symmetric monoidal functor $F: mathcal{C}to mathcal{C}boxtimes {rm Ver}_p$, where ${rm Ver}_p$ is the Verlinde category (the semisimplification of ${rm Rep}_{bf k}(mathbb{Z}/p)$). This generalizes the usual Frobenius twist functor in modular representation theory and also one defined in arXiv:1503.01492, where it is used to show that if $mathcal{C}$ is finite and semisimple then it admits a fiber functor to ${rm Ver}_p$. The main new feature is that when $mathcal{C}$ is not semisimple, $F$ need not be left or right exact, and in fact this lack of exactness is the main obstruction to the existence of a fiber functor $mathcal{C}to {rm Ver}_p$. We show, however, that there is a 6-periodic long exact sequence which is a replacement for the exactness of $F$, and use it to show that for categories with finitely many simple objects $F$ does not increase the Frobenius-Perron dimension. We also define the notion of a Frobenius exact category, which is a STC on which $F$ is exact, and define the canonical maximal Frobenius exact subcategory $mathcal{C}_{rm ex}$ inside any STC $mathcal{C}$ with finitely many simple objects. Namely, this is the subcategory of all objects whose Frobenius-Perron dimension is preserved by $F$. We prove that a finite STC is Frobenius exact if and only if it admits a (necessarily unique) fiber functor to ${rm Ver}_p$. We also show that a sufficiently large power of $F$ lands in $mathcal{C}_{rm ex}$. Also, in characteristic 2 we introduce a slightly weaker notion of an almost Frobenius exact category and show that a STC with Chevalley property is (almost) Frobenius exact.
Parallel transport of a connection in a smooth fibre bundle yields a functor from the path groupoid of the base manifold into a category that describes the fibres of the bundle. We characterize functors obtained like this by two notions we introduce: local trivializations and smooth descent data. This provides a way to substitute categories of functors for categories of smooth fibre bundles with connection. We indicate that this concept can be generalized to connections in categorified bundles, and how this generalization improves the understanding of higher dimensional parallel transport.
We give an elementary and direct combinatorial definition of opetopes in terms of trees, well-suited for graphical manipulation and explicit computation. To relate our definition to the classical definition, we recast the Baez-Dolan slice construction for operads in terms of polynomial monads: our opetopes appear naturally as types for polynomial monads obtained by iterating the Baez-Dolan construction, starting with the trivial monad. We show that our notion of opetope agrees with Leinsters. Next we observe a suspension operation for opetopes, and define a notion of stable opetopes. Stable opetopes form a least fixpoint for the Baez-Dolan construction. A final section is devoted to example computations, and indicates also how the calculus of opetopes is well-suited for machine implementation.