The monoidal center and the character algebra (Q2396809)

As the author says in the Introduction, many results on Hopf algebras have been generalized in the setting of tensor categories. The paper under review is a new contribution in this way, giving a category-theoretical counterpart of the character theory. In order to do that, after a section of preliminaries, in Section \(3\) the author recalls the construction of the central Hopf (co)monad on a rigid monoidal category. In Section \(4\) he shows the first main result (Theorem 4.1 and its corollary), which states the injectivity of the linear map \[ \mathrm{ch}:G_{r_{k}}(\mathcal {C})\rightarrow CF(\mathcal {C}), [X]\mapsto \mathrm{ch}(X) (X\in \mathcal {C}), \] where \(\mathcal {C}\) is a pivotal finite tensor category over an algebraically closed field \(k\), \(G_{r_{k}}(\mathcal {C}):=k\otimes_Z G_r(\mathcal {C})\), being \(G_r(\mathcal {C})\) the Grothendieck ring of \(\mathcal {C}\), and \(CF(\mathcal {C})\) denotes the algebra of class functions. In Section \(5\), under the assumption that \(\mathcal {C}\) is unimodular, the author shows (Theorem 5.9) that the map \(\mathrm{ch}\) is an isomorphism if and only if \(\mathcal {C}\) is semisimple. Moreover, he obtains a Maschke-type theorem and a Radford-type trace formula. Finally, the last section is devoted to give applications of these results to fusion categories.