No Arabic abstract
This work is the first one in a series, in which we develop a mathematical theory of enriched (braided) monoidal categories and their representations. In this work, we introduce the notion of the $E_0$-center ($E_1$-center or $E_2$-center) of an enriched (monoidal or braided monoidal) category, and compute the centers explicitly when the enriched (braided monoidal or monoidal) categories are obtained from the canonical constructions. These centers have important applications in the mathematical theory of gapless boundaries of 2+1D topological orders and that of topological phase transitions in physics. They also play very important roles in the higher representation theory, which is the focus of the second work in the series.
This is the first of a series of papers on enriched infinity categories, seeking to reduce enriched higher category theory to the higher algebra of presentable infinity categories, which is better understood and can be approached via universal properties. In this paper, we introduce enriched presheaves on an enriched infinity category. We prove analogues of most familiar properties of presheaves. For example, we compute limits and colimits of presheaves, prove that all presheaves are colimits of representable presheaves, and prove a version of the Yoneda lemma.
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.
Restriction categories were introduced to provide an axiomatic setting for the study of partially defined mappings; they are categories equipped with an operation called restriction which assigns to every morphism an endomorphism of its domain, to be thought of as the partial identity that is defined to just the same degree as the original map. In this paper, we show that restriction categories can be identified with emph{enriched categories} in the sense of Kelly for a suitable enrichment base. By varying that base appropriately, we are also able to capture the notions of join and range restriction category in terms of enriched category theory.
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.
We introduce DisCoPy, an open source toolbox for computing with monoidal categories. The library provides an intuitive syntax for defining string diagrams and monoidal functors. Its modularity allows the efficient implementation of computational experiments in the various applications of category theory where diagrams have become a lingua franca. As an example, we used DisCoPy to perform natural language processing on quantum hardware for the first time.