Definitions
Transfors between 2-categories
Morphisms in 2-categories
Structures in 2-categories
Limits in 2-categories
Structures on 2-categories
Let be a 2-category.
A morphism in is called (representably) fully-faithful (or sometimes just ff) if for all objects , the functor
It is said to be co-fully faithful or corepresentably fully faithful if for all objects , the functor
is a full and faithful functor. Note that the shortened name “co-fully faithful” can be misleading, as a functor is corepresentably fully faithful if and only if it is representably fully faithful as a 1-cell in (rather than .
Fully faithful morphisms in a 2-category may also be called 1-monic, and be said to make their source into a 1-subobject of their target. See subcategory for some discussion.
Fully faithful morphisms are often the right class of a factorization system. The left class in consists of essentially surjective functors; in a regular 2-category it consists of the eso morphisms.
Just as in a 1-category any equalizer is monic, in a 2-category any inverter or equifier is fully faithful.
This is not always the “right” notion of fully-faithfulness in a 2-category. In particular, in enriched category theory this definition does not recapture the correct notion of enriched fully-faithfulness. It is possible, however, to characterize -fully-faithful functors 2-categorically; see codiscrete cofibration. In general, fully faithful morphisms should be defined with respect to a proarrow equipment (or some other context for formal category theory): in particular, this recovers -fully-faithfulness. A 1-cell in a proarrow equipment is fully faithful if the unit of the adjunction is invertible.
In the 2-category Cat the full and faithful morphisms are precisely the full and faithful functors; and the corepresentably fully faithful morphisms are precisely the absolutely dense functors.
Last revised on April 22, 2023 at 16:10:13. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.