Definitions
Transfors between 2-categories
Morphisms in 2-categories
Structures in 2-categories
Limits in 2-categories
Structures on 2-categories
A 2-category is a good context for doing a lot of category theory (including internal category theory), but there are some things that are hard to do there, such as to talk about weighted limits and colimits, and enriched category theory more generally. This leads one to introduce the notion of a 2-category equipped with proarrows, which is a 2-category along with extra data that plays the role of profunctors, allowing the definition of weighted limits and other aspects of category theory.
However, it would also be nice if the extra data in a proarrow equipment were somehow determined by the 2-category we started with. This is especially so when talking about functors between equipments, since functors between 2-categories are often easier to construct. It turns out that in many cases, including the most common ones, this is the case: we can construct the proarrows in terms of the underlying 2-category. This was originally realized by Ross Street.
The idea is to identify a profunctor with its collage, aka its cograph, which is a special sort of cospan in (or , or whatever other 2-category one wants to start with). One then simply has to characterize, in 2-categorical terms, which cospans are collages, and how to do things like compose them. It turns out that in most cases the characterization is precisely that they are the two-sided codiscrete cofibrations — i.e. the two-sided discrete fibrations in the opposite 2-category.
Suppose that is a 2-category with finite 2-colimits, and . A cofibration from to is a cospan which is an internal two-sided fibration in . As remarked at fibration in a 2-category, there is a 2-monad on whose algebras are such fibrations. In other words, there is a 2-comonad on whose coalgebras are such fibrations. This 2-comonad is defined by
where is the interval category and denotes the copower with . In the pushouts, the map is the inclusion at and is the inclusion at .
A cospan in a 2-category is codiscrete if it is codiscrete in the 2-category . This means that for any , the hom-category is equivalent to a discrete category. Explicitly, it means that given any two morphisms of cospans, if there exists a 2-cell from one to the other in , then it is unique and invertible.
A codiscrete cofibration is a two-sided cofibration which is codiscrete as a cospan.
We sketch a characterization of cofibrations in , where is any Bénabou cosmos. Let be a cospan and let . We claim that has the following description.
Its objects are the disjoint union of those of , , and , i.e. .
and and are (disjoint) full subcategories of .
There are no morphisms in from to , or from to , or from to . That is, for , , and we have .
If , , and , we have , , and .
That is a -category is immediate, and it is easy to check the universal property. We write for the inclusions.
Now suppose that is a coalgebra for the 2-comonad in question. Therefore, in particular we have a map in , so that and (or perhaps only isomorphic; it really makes no difference here). Moreover, the counit of the comonad is the obvious map , so we must have .
Since and are injective on objects and have disjoint images, so must be and . And since and are fully faithful -functors, the action of and on homs must be split monic in , and the action of on homs in and must be split epic. But since , the action of on homs must also be split monic, hence an isomorphism, and hence so must that of and be. Therefore, and are fully faithful inclusions with disjoint images.
Clearly must take the images of and to the images of and , respectively. Because , it must be that takes the rest of to itself, sitting in the canonical copy of inside . This uniquely defines , as long as satisfies the condition that
It is then easy to check that if and are fully faithful with disjoint images and this condition holds, then is in fact a coalgebra for the comonad in question, i.e. a two-sided cofibration from to .
Note that such a cofibration from to can be identified with the following data: a category , profunctors , , and , and a morphism of profunctors. Such a thing is sometimes called a gamut from to .
Now a 2-cell in is simply a natural transformation between functors whose components on the images of and are isomorphisms. Thus, if is a cofibration as above with the property that is empty, then it must be codiscrete. The converse is easy to check, taking to be the ordinal as a category. But a gamut with is nothing but a profunctor ; hence codiscrete cofibrations in can be precisely identified with the collages of profunctors.
A codiscrete cofibration in the 2-category of topoi can be identified with a left exact functor.
Codiscrete cofibrations in the 2-category of double categories, double functors, and horizontal transformations can be identified with double profunctors.
The examples of profunctors suggest that given any 2-category with finite 2-colimits, we may try to canonically equip it with proarrows by defining the proarrows to be the codiscrete cofibrations. The sticky point is then how to define units and composition of such proarrows in order to obtain an equipment.
The unit is obvious: we should take the unit proarrow of to be the cospan , which is always a codiscrete cofibration.
Binary composition is subtler. The obvious way to compose codiscrete cofibrations and , of course, is to take a pushout . It is not hard to show (see references):
In any 2-category with finite 2-colimits, if and are cofibrations, then so is .
However, will not be codiscrete even if and are. In , if and are collages of profunctors and , then represents the gamut consisting of , , and the composite profunctor , with the middle category being . Thus, in order to obtain the correct composite, we need to forget about somehow. The best way to do this seems to be using a factorization system in a 2-category, akin the way in which we construct the bicategory of relations from any regular category.
We are looking for a 2-categorical factorization system in such that if we have a two-sided cofibration and we factor into an -map and an -map, then the resulting cospan is a codiscrete cofibration. Codiscreteness means in particular that the -map should be codiscrete, i.e. representably cofaithful and co-conservative. Moreover, if was already a codiscrete cofibration, then should already be in . This suggests the following definition.
A 2-category with finite 2-limits and 2-colimits is pre-equippable if it has a factorization system such that
It is equippable if in addition it satisfies:
Co-conservative morphisms are also called liberal. Recall that by definition of codiscreteness, if is a codiscrete cofibration, then is cofaithful and liberal; thus the first two conditions are compatible.
The example to keep in mind is , for any suitable , where is the class of essentially surjective -functors and is the class of -fully-faithful functors.
Any morphism which is right orthogonal to codiscrete cofibrations is representably fully faithful. In particular, if is pre-equippable, then every morphism in is representably fully faithful.
For any in , we have a codiscrete cofibration , and thus is in . But orthogonality with respect to all such morphisms is precisely representable fully-faithfulness.
Any representably fully faithful morphism is right orthogonal to any cocomma object?. In particular, is pre-equippable and every codiscrete cofibration is a cocomma object, then is precisely the class of representably fully faithful morphisms.
Maps out of a cocomma object are in canonical correspondence with 2-cells in . But representable fully-faithfulness means that 2-cells lift uniquely along such a map. Hence so do maps out of a cocomma object, and hence any representably fully faithful map is right orthogonal to all cocomma cospans.
If is pre-equippable, then any inverter or equifier is in , and every morphism in is cofaithful and liberal.
Any inverter is always right orthogonal to any liberal morphism, and any equifier is always right orthogonal to any cofaithful morphism.
In an equippable 2-category, we can compose cofibrations in the desired way.
If is equippable, is a two-sided cofibration, and is an -factorization, then is a codiscrete cofibration. In particular, the category is coreflective in the category .
Since -morphisms are cofaithful and liberal, is certainly codiscrete. That it is a cofibration is proven as in (MB, 4.18). Coreflectivity follows by orthogonality for the factorization system , since all codiscrete cofibrations are in by assumption.
Therefore, in an equippable 2-category, we can define the composite of codiscrete cofibrations and to be the codiscrete coreflection of the cofibration .
If is equippable, there is a 2-category , with the same objects as , and with codiscrete cofibrations as 1-morphisms. Moreover, there is a locally fully faithful identity-on-objects (pseudo) 2-functor such that each 1-morphism has a right adjoint. Therefore, is canonically a 2-category equipped with proarrows (hence the term “equippable”).
This is essentially (MB, 4.20).
One can then impose additional axioms on to get good behavior of this equipment, and try to characterize the equipments arising in this way; see (MB, section 5) and (PC).
Note that since coreflections are determined by a universal property, the composite of codiscrete cofibrations is independent of the chosen factorization system . In fact, there are two different “extreme” ways that we might try to define an equippable factorization system; we could either
In the second case we mean that is the class of all morphisms right orthogonal to the morphisms such that is a codiscrete cofibration, and then is the class of all morphisms left orthogonal to . This implies, of course, that contains the codiscrete cofibrations.
Neither of the above choices is guaranteed to produce a factorization system (since the factorizations may not exist), but if either one does, then that factorization system is automatically pre-equippable. In the first case this is obvious, since all codiscrete cofibrations are cofaithful and liberal, while in the second case, it follows since inverters and equifiers are then necessarily in , and anything left orthogonal to inverters and equifiers must be cofaithful and liberal. Thus, a 2-category is equippable if either of these two choices produces a factorization system for which is closed under pushout and tensors with .
The (essentially surjective, -fully faithful) factorization system is generated by the codiscrete cofibrations, and is equippable.
It suffices to show that a -functor is right orthogonal to codiscrete cofibrations if and only if it is -fully faithful, i.e. each morphism is an isomorphism in . For “if”, it suffices to observe that -fully faithful functors are right orthogonal to all essentially surjective ones, and any codiscrete cofibration is essentially surjective. For “only if,” suppose given , let be the unit -category, consider the object as a -profunctor , and let be its collage. Then we have a square
where the bottom arrow is the identity on the nontrivial hom-object . A lifting in this square supplies a section of , and uniqueness of lifting against the collage of (also as a profunctor ) shows that it is an inverse isomorphism; hence is -fully faithful.
Finally, it is straightforward to verify that -fully-faithful functors are closed under pushout and tensors with .
In , every liberal is automatically cofaithful, and there is a pre-equippable factorization system in which is the class of liberal morphisms. However, it is not equippable, even when .
This is essentially (MB, 3.4). In this case consists of the -fully faithful morphisms which are additionally closed under absolute colimits, while consists of the functors which are surjective up to absolute colimits (“Cauchy dense” functors). When , all absolute colimits are generated by retracts, and it is easy to construct an example of a fully faithful functor closed under retracts and a pushout of it which is no longer closed under retracts.
An equippable 2-category with liberal cofaithfuls = liberals is called faithfully co-conservational in (MB). This is the only case considered there, but the proofs generalize directly to any equippable 2-category. Note that is not faithfully co-conservational, since the above factorization system is only pre-equippable: is not closed under pushout. Its sub-2-category of Cauchy complete -categories is faithfully co-conservational, but this is arguably just because when restricted to , the above factorization coincides with the other, better one. Thus, it seems that perhaps in general it is better to consider the factorization system generated by the codiscrete cofibrations.
Ross Street, “Fibrations in bicategories”, Numdam, and correction.
Aurelio Carboni and Scott Johnson? and Ross Street and Dominic Verity, “Modulated bicategories” (MB) MR.
Bob Rosebrugh and Richard Wood, “Proarrows and cofibrations” (PC), MR
Bob Rosebrugh and Richard Wood, “Gamuts and cofibrations”. Cahiers de topologie et geometrie differentielle categoriques 31.3 (1990): 197-211. Numdam
Bob Rosebrugh and Richard Wood, “Pullback preserving functors”. Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 73.1 (1991): 73-90.
Last revised on August 9, 2024 at 20:10:22. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.