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 show any slightly degenerate weakly group-theoretical fusion category admits a minimal extension. Let $d$ be a positive square-free integer, given a weakly group-theoretical non-degenerate fusion category $mathcal{C}$, assume that $text{FPdim}(mat
hcal{C})=nd$ and $(n,d)=1$. If $(text{FPdim}(X)^2,d)=1$ for all simple objects $X$ of $mathcal{C}$, then we show that $mathcal{C}$ contains a non-degenerate fusion subcategory $mathcal{C}(mathbb{Z}_d,q)$. In particular, we obtain that integral fusion categories of FP-dimensions $p^md$ such that $mathcal{C}subseteq text{sVec}$ are nilpotent and group-theoretical, where $p$ is a prime and $(p,d)=1$.
We study abelian envelopes for pseudo-tensor categories with the property that every object in the envelope is a quotient of an object in the pseudo-tensor category. We establish an intrinsic criterion on pseudo-tensor categories for the existence of
an abelian envelope satisfying this quotient property. This allows us to interpret the extension of scalars and Deligne tensor product of tensor categories as abelian envelopes, and to enlarge the class of tensor categories for which all extensions of scalars and tensor products are known to remain tensor categories. For an affine group scheme G, we show that pseudo-tensor subcategories of RepG have abelian envelopes with the quotient property, and we study many other such examples. This leads us to conjecture that all abelian envelopes satisfy the quotient property.
In arXiv:1910.12059 Liu, Palcoux and Wu proved a remarkable necessary condition for a fusion ring to admit a unitary categorification, by constructing invariants of the fusion ring that have to be positive if it is unitarily categorifiable. The main
goal of this note is to provide a somewhat more direct proof of this result. In the last subsection we discuss integrality properties of the Liu-Palcoux-Wu invariants.
We study generalized Deligne categories and related tensor envelopes for the universal two-dimensional cobordism theories described by rational functions, recently defined by Sazdanovic and one of the authors.
We give two proofs of a level-rank duality for braided fusion categories obtained from quantum groups of type $C$ at roots of unity. The first proof uses conformal embeddings, while the second uses a classification of braided fusion categories associ
ated with quantum groups of type $C$ at roots of unity. In addition we give a similar result for non-unitary braided fusion categories quantum groups of types $B$ and $C$ at odd roots of unity.
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 monoi
dal 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.
We give a nontrivial lower bound for global dimension of a spherical fusion category.
