Double construction for monoidal categories (Q1899820)

Following work of \textit{P. Freyd} and \textit{D. Yetter} on tangles and duality, \textit{M. C. Shum} [Ph. D. Thesis, Macquarie University 1989; J. Pure Appl. Algebra 93, No. 1, 57-110 (1994; Zbl 0803.18004)] identified the category of tangles on ribbons as the free tortile monoidal category on a single generating object. Inspired by work of \textit{V. Turaev} on Yang-Baxter operators, \textit{A. Joyal} and the reviewer [``Tortile Yang- Baxter operators in tensor categories'', J. Pure Appl. Algebra 71, No. 1, 43-51 (1991; Zbl 0726.18004)] proved that the free tortile monoidal category was also the universal monoidal category containing a tortile Yang-Baxter operator. This proof required the construction of various new monoidal categories from old in order to apply the universal properties. In particular, the centre \(Z({\mathcal V})\) of a monoidal category \({\mathcal V}\) was defined and shown to be a braided monoidal category. \textit{S. Majid} pointed out the relationship between Drinfeld's construction \(D(H)\) of a braided Hopf algebra from a Hopf algebra \(H\): the centre of the category of representations of \(H\) is equivalent to the category of representations of \(D(H)\). He also pointed out that this last category was equivalent to Yetter's category of crossed \(H\)-bimodules. One might ask whether there is a modification of the centre construction which leads to a tortile monoidal category \(D({\mathcal V})\). What a tortile monoidal category has on top of the braiding are twist automorphisms and duals. Rather than adding duals, the authors suppose their original monoidal category \({\mathcal V}\) is left autonomous. Then all they need to do is add the twist. A clue for this was already present in the paper of \textit{Joyal} and the reviewer [loc. cit.] which gave a formula for the square of the twist in terms of the braiding and duals. The paper gives full details of the proof that \(D({\mathcal V})\) is a tortile tensor category using the string diagram calculus, and gives the connections with Hopf algebras and crossed bimodules.