Third cohomology and fusion categories (Q1707295)

The close relationship between low-dimensional group cohomology and monoidal categories in general, and fusion categories in particular, is well known. The monoidal centre construction, applied to a certain fusion category, produces a non-degenerate braided fusion category (or modular category) and, in this way, twisted Drinfeld centres \(Z(G,\alpha)\), for any finite group and 3-cocycle \(\alpha\), appear as monoidal centers of categories of \(G\)-graded vector spaces \(\mathcal{V}(G,\alpha)\) with the associativity constraint defined by the 3-cocycle. The set of these twisted Drinfeld centres has been shown to form a group, the so-called group of modular extensions extensions of the representation category of \(G\), which is isomorphic to the third cohomology group of \(G\). In this paper, the authors show that for any abelian group \(G\), pointed twisted Drinfeld centres of \(G\) form a subgroup of the group of modular extensions and they identify this subgroup with a group of quadratic extensions containing \(G\) as a Lagrangian subgroup. Moreover, they compute this kind of Lagrangian extensions thereby providing an interpretation of the internal structure of the third cohomology group of an abelian group \(G\) in terms of fusion categories.