Left-Garside categories, self-distributivity, and braids (Q1034190)

The notion of a Garside monoid emerged at the end of the 1990's as a development of Garside's theory of braids, and it led to many developments. More recently, Bessis, Digne-Michel and Krammer introduced the notion of a Garside category as a further extension, and they used it to capture new, nontrivial examples and improve our understanding of their algebraic structure. In this paper the author describes and investigates a new example of a (left)-Garside category, namely a certain category associated with the left self-distributivity law \(\text{LD}: x(yz) = (xy)(xz)\). He also develops the notion of a locally left-Garside monoid. In this framework, the connection between the self-distributivity law LD and braids amounts to the result that a certain category associated with LD is a left-Garside category, which projects onto the standard Garside category of braids. The interest in this law originated in the discovery of several nontrivial structures that obey it, in particular in set theory and in low-dimensional topology. Moreover this approach leads to a realistic program for establishing the Embedding Conjecture of \textit{P. Dehornoy} [``Braids and self-distributivity''. Prog. Math. 192 (2000; Zbl 0958.20033), Chap.~IX].