Factorization homology and 4D TQFT (Q2125351)

Factorization Homology is a generalization of homology tailored for topological manifolds instead of general topological spaces. In the paper under review, factorization homology is constructed for the 3-2 part of Crane-Yetter Theory. As a corollary, the paper proves the folklore theorem that the Crane-Yetter Theory of a closed surface is trivial. The construction comes from an excision result on a relevant skein category. This was conjectured by \textit{T. Johnson-Freyd} [Prog. Math. 340, 371--409 (2021; Zbl 1497.18035), Section 9], and is independently proven in greater generality (where objects are ribbon categories instead of modular categories) in the PhD thesis of \textit{J. Cooke}, where it is also applied to quantization of character varieties [``Excision of Skein categories and factorization homology'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1910.02630}].