The Catalan simplicial set II (Q2374324)

Before work began on the two papers of which this is the second, the author had a proposed definition of skew-monoidal bicategory. He asked the reviewer how we could test whether he had all the axioms. My answer was that we needed some kind of coherence theorem. From that arose the idea of seeing skew-monoidal bicategories as simplicial morphisms into an appropriate nerve \(\mathrm{NCat}\) of the cartesian monoidal 2-category \(\mathrm{Cat}\). The author began calculating what the domain of those simplicial morphisms should contain. With the collaboration of Richard Garner and Steve Lack, a very pretty picture appeared for representing skew-monoidal categories as simplicial morphisms: as reported in the first paper [\textit{M. Buckley} et al., Math. Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. 158, No. 2, 211--222 (2015; Zbl 1376.18005)], the domain is the Catalan simplicial set \(\mathbb{C}\). In this second paper, the author returns to bicategories. He first shows that skew monoidales in any monoidal bicategory \(\mathcal{B}\) can be faithfully represented as arbitrary simplicial morphisms from \(\mathbb{C}\) to \(\mathrm{N}\mathcal{B}\). Then he moves up a dimension, replacing \(\mathcal{B}\) by a monoidal tricategory \(\mathrm{Bicat}\) of bicategories. There is a surprise: simplicial morphisms \(\mathbb{C}\to \mathrm{NBicat}\) contain new data which are not present in the classical definition of monoidal bicategory. He shows that this extra data become redundant when those constraints that should be equivalences in the non-skew case are equivalences. The paper concludes with the result that skew-monoidal bicategories as originally conceived are represented as those implicial morphisms \(\mathbb{C}\to \mathrm{NBicat}\) which take certain distinguished simplices in \(\mathbb{C}\) to trivial coherence data.