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In this mainly expository note, we state a criterion for when a left Kan extension of a lax monoidal functor along a strong monoidal functor can itself be equipped with a lax monoidal structure, in a way that results in a left Kan extension in MonCat. This belongs to the general theory of algebraic Kan extensions, as developed by Melli`es-Tabareau, Koudenburg and Weber, and is very close to an instance of a theorem of Koudenburg. We find this special case particularly important due to its connections with the theory of graded monads.
One way of interpreting a left Kan extension is as taking a kind of partial colimit, whereby one replaces parts of a diagram by their colimits. We make this intuition precise by means of the partial evaluations sitting in the so-called bar construction of monads. The (pseudo)monads of interest for forming colimits are the monad of diagrams and the monad of small presheaves, both on the (huge) category CAT of locally small categories. Throughout, particular care is taken to handle size issues, which are notoriously delicate in the context of free cocompletion. We spell out, with all 2-dimensional details, the structure maps of these pseudomonads. Then, based on a detailed general proof of how the restriction-of-scalars construction of monads extends to the case of pseudoalgebras over pseudomonads, we define a morphism of monads between them, which we call image. This morphism allows us in particular to generalize the idea of confinal functors i.e. of functors which leave colimits invariant in an absolute way. This generalization includes the concept of absolute colimit as a special case. The main result of this paper spells out how a pointwise left Kan extension of a diagram corresponds precisely to a partial evaluation of its colimit. This categorical result is analogous to what happens in the case of probability monads, where a conditional expectation of a random variable corresponds to a partial evaluation of its center of mass.
Frobenius monoidal functors preserve duals. We show that conversely, (co)monoidal functors between autonomous categories which preserve duals are Frobenius monoidal. We apply this result to linearly distributive functors between autonomous categories.
We construct a lax monoidal Topological Quantum Field Theory that computes Deligne-Hodge polynomials of representation varieties of the fundamental group of any closed manifold into any complex algebraic group $G$. As byproduct, we obtain formulas for these polynomials in terms of homomorphisms between the space of mixed Hodge modules on $G$. The construction is developed in a categorical-theoretic framework allowing its application to other situations.
Indexed symmetric monoidal categories are an important refinement of bicategories -- this structure underlies several familiar bicategories, including the homotopy bicategory of parametrized spectra, and its equivariant and fiberwise generalizations. In this paper, we extend existing coherence theorems to the setting of indexed symmetric monoidal categories. The most central theorem states that a large family of operations on a bicategory defined from an indexed symmetric monoidal category are all canonically isomorphic. As a part of this theorem, we introduce a rigorous graphical calculus that specifies when two such operations admit a canonical isomorphism.
This paper has been withdrawn and replaced by arXiv:1309.5035. In this paper we describe some examples of so called spherical functors between triangulated categories, which generalize the notion of a spherical object. We also give sufficient conditions for a collection of spherical functors to yield a weak representation of the category of tangles, and prove a structure theorem for such representations under certain restrictions.