Although just another way of writing down the axioms of a strict 2-group, the form of specification used for -groups, and, adapted for cat-n-groups, is very useful as it is in purely group theoretic terms and so is often easier to check than the more categorically phrased version, for instance, in deriving a -group structure from a simplicial group, or a -group structure from an -fold simplicial group.
The inclusion of this entry is to help the user move between the various forms used in the literature: see references below.
A -group is a triple, , where is a group and are endomorphisms of satisfying conditions
and .
(where is the group generated by the commutators )
A cat-group is just a reformulation of an internal category in Grp. (The interchange law is given by the kernel commutator condition.) As we know these latter objects are equivalent to crossed modules, we expect to be able to go between -groups and crossed modules without hindrance, and we can:
(Form of the Brown–Spencer theorem). The categories of -groups and crossed modules are equivalent.
Setting , and then the action of on by conjugation within makes into a crossed module. Conversely if is a crossed module, then setting and letting be defined by
and
for , we have that is a -group.
Loday introduced -groups in his work on the modelling of homotopy n-types.
Last revised on June 21, 2019 at 07:01:30. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.