The Intrinsic Fundamental Group of a Linear Category

We provide an intrinsic definition of the fundamental group of a linear category over a ring as the automorphism group of the fibre functor on Galois coverings. If the universal covering exists, we prove that this group is isomorphic to the Galois group of the universal covering. The grading deduced from a Galois covering enables us to describe the canonical monomorphism from its automorphism group to the first Hochschild-Mitchell cohomology vector space.

Galois coverings, Morita equivalence and smash extensions of categories over a field

We consider categories over a field $k$ in order to prove that smash extensions and Galois coverings with respect to a finite group coincide up to Morita equivalence of $k$-categories. For this purpose we describe processes providing Morita equivalences called contraction and expansion. We prove that composition of these processes provides any Morita equivalence, a result which is related with the karoubianisation (or idempotent completion) and additivisation of a $k$-category.