category with duals (list of them)
dualizable object (what they have)
ribbon category, a.k.a. tortile category
monoidal dagger-category?
homotopy theory, (∞,1)-category theory, homotopy type theory
flavors: stable, equivariant, rational, p-adic, proper, geometric, cohesive, directed…
models: topological, simplicial, localic, …
see also algebraic topology
Introductions
Definitions
Paths and cylinders
Homotopy groups
Basic facts
Theorems
For a dualizable object in a symmetric monoidal category (or more generally an object in a traced monoidal category), there is a natural notion of the trace of an endomorphism , which reproduces the ordinary notion of trace of a linear map of finite dimensional vector spaces in linear algebra for the case that .
The idea of the trace operation is easily seen in string diagram notation: essentially one takes the endomorphism , “bends it around” using the duality and the symmetry and connects its output to its input.
This definition makes sense in any braided monoidal category, but often in non-symmetric cases one wants instead a slightly modified version which requires the extra structure of a balancing.
The trace of the identity is called the dimension or Euler characteristic of .
with its standard monoidal structure (tensor product of vector spaces): in this case tr(f) is the usual trace of a linear map;
, the category of -graded vector spaces with the nontrivial symmetric braiding which is on two odd graded vector spaces: in this case the above is the supertrace on supervectorspaces, .
: here the trace is the co-span co-trace which can be seen as describing the gluing of in/out boundaries of cobordisms
: this reproduces the notion of trace of a linear map within the interpretation of spans of groupoids as linear maps in the context of groupoidification and geometric function theory, made explicit at span trace
In the symmetric monoidal (infinity,1)-category of spectra, the trace on the identity on a suspension spectrum of a manifold is the Euler characteristic of (see there).
See trace of a category.
See trace in a bicategory?.
Let be a dualizable object, and any object. From an endomorphism of , one can produce an endomorphism of , by applying the duality data of . In terms of string diagrams, this is “bending along” the strand representing .
TO DO: Draw the diagram just described.
Suppose , are finite-dimensional vector spaces over a field, with dimensions and , respectively. For any space let denote the space of linear operators on . The partial trace over , Tr, is a mapping
Let and be bases for and respectively. Then has a matrix representation where and relative to the basis of the space given by . Consider the sum
for over . This gives the matrix . The associated linear operator on is independent of the choice of bases and is defined as the partial trace.
Consider a quantum system, , in the presence of an environment, . Consider what is known in quantum information theory as the CNOT gate:
Suppose our system has the simple state and the environment has the simple state . Then . In the quantum operation formalism we have
where we inserted the normalization factor .
The categorical notion of trace in a monoidal category is due to
national Conference on Geometric Topology (Warsaw, 1978), pages 81{102, Warsaw, 1980. PWN.
and
Surveys include
Peter Selinger, A survey of graphical languages for monoidal categories (pdf), Section 5
Kate Ponto, Mike Shulman, Traces in symmetric monoidal categories (pdf).
Generalization of this to indexed monoidal categories is in
and to bicategories in
Further developments are in
Andre Joyal, Ross Street, and Dominic Verity, Traced Monoidal Categories
David Ben-Zvi, David Nadler, Nonlinear traces (arXiv:1305.7175)
For the notion of partial trace, particularly its application to quantum mechanics, see:
Last revised on June 14, 2020 at 19:03:01. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.