The center functor is fully faithful (Q1989717)

It is well-known that the notion of center is not functorial unless we only consider simple algebras. What is the categorical analogue of this phenomenon? The paper under review tries to give the answer. The categorical analogue of a simple algebra is so called indecomposable multi-tensor category and the center is the well-known Drinfeld center. Let \(\mathcal{MT}en_{k}^{ind}\) be the category of indecomposable multi-tensor categories over a field \(k\) with morphisms given by bimodules. Similarly, let \(\mathcal{BT}en_{k}\) the category of braided tensor categories with morphisms given by monoidal bimodules. The main result of this paper can be described as follows: the center functor \[ \mathcal{Z}: \mathcal{MT}en_{k}^{ind} \rightarrow \mathcal{BT}en_{k},\quad\mathcal{C}\mapsto \mathcal{Z}(\mathcal{C}) \] where \(\mathcal{Z}(\mathcal{C})\) denote the Drinfeld center of \(\mathcal{C}\), is a well-defined symmetric monoidal functor. Moreover, the authors show that if we restrict our functor to the subcategory consisting of indecomposable multi-fusion categories, then we obtain a fully faithful functor. All of these results are very interesting to the reviewer since it not only gave new proofs to some classical results in the theory of tensor categories but also give new methods and insights.