On the category of weak bialgebras (Q397895)

A duoidal category, introduced by \textit{M. Aguiar} and \textit{S. Mahajan} [Monoidal functors, species and Hopf algebras. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2010; Zbl 1209.18002)] under the name of \(2\)-monoidal category, is a category with two, possibly different, monoidal structures related by an interchange law. Let \(\mathsf{duo}\) denote the category whose objects are duoidal categories and whose morphisms are functors which are comonoidal with respect to both monoidal structures. To any functor \(M:\mathcal{S}\to\mathsf{duo}\), from an arbitrary category \(\mathcal{S}\), the authors associate the category \(\mathsf{bmd}(M)\) of bimonoids. Let \(\mathsf{sfr}\) denote the category whose objects are separable Frobenius (co)algebras over a given base field \(\mathsf{k}\). For every object \(R\) in \(\mathsf{sfr}\), the category \(\mathsf{bim}(R^e)\) of \(R^e\)-bimodules is endowed with a structure of a duoidal category. This defines a functor \(\mathsf{bim}(-^e):\mathsf{sfr}\to\mathsf{duo}\) so that one can consider \(\mathsf{bmd}(\mathsf{bim}(-^e))\). The authors prove that the objects in the latter category can be identified with the so-called weak bialgebras. In view of this identification, weak bialgebras form a new category which is denoted by \(\mathsf{wba}\). Let \(\mathsf{cat}\) be the category of small categories with finitely many objects. For any object \(A\) in \(\mathsf{cat}\), the free \(\mathsf{k}\)-vector space \(\mathsf{k}A\) spanned by the set of morphisms in \(A\) carries a weak bialgebra structure and this defines a functor \(\mathsf{k}:\mathsf{cat}\to\mathsf{wba}\). The authors construct a right adjoint \(\mathsf{g}:\mathsf{wba}\to\mathsf{cat}\) of this functor and the unit of the adjunction is a natural isomorphism. Finally this adjunction is proved to restrict to an adjunction between the full subcategory \(\mathsf{grp}\) of groupoids in \(\mathsf{cat}\) and the full subcategory \(\mathsf{wha}\) of weak Hopf algebras in \(\mathsf{wba}\).