The incidence comodule bialgebra of the Baez-Dolan construction (Q2020408)

From an operad \(\mathsf{P}\) can be carried two constructions about which the paper is devoted: the two-sided bar construction of the free operad on \(\mathsf{P}\) and on the Baez-Dolan construction on \(\mathsf{P}\). It appears that this provides a comodule bialgebra (on groupoid slices). Homotopy cardinality may be applied to recover comodule bialgebras in the usual sense (at the price of adding some finiteness conditions). With some instances of these constructions are recovered many well-known comodule bialgebras. In addition to this deep result, and although the result is categorical in nature, the author also focuses on providing combinatorial description (for instance in terms of trees) of the various objects occurring in the text, which is interesting to make more concrete the abstract and formal constructions. The main result of the paper takes the following form (Theorem 3.2.1, p. 47): For any operad \(\mathsf{P}\), the two-sided bar constructions \(Bar_{\mathsf{S}}(\mathsf{P}^*)\) and \(Bar_{\mathsf{S}}(\mathsf{P}^\circ)\) together endow the slice category \(\mathbf{Grpd}_{/\mathsf{S}(\mathrm{tr}(\mathsf{P}))}\) with the structure of a comodule bialgebra. At this point some explanations are necessary to provide a finer understanding of the above statement. By ``operad'' is meant a ``colored symmetric operad in \(\mathrm{Set}\)'' with a groupoid of colours (rather than just a set). It can be equivalently described (see p. 26) by a finitary polynomial monad \(\mathsf{P}\colon \mathbf{Grpd}_{/I}\to \mathbf{Grpd}_{/I}\) (\(I\) stands for the groupoid of colours). \(\mathsf{P}^*\): for any polynomial endofunctor \(\mathsf{P}\), one has the free monad \(\mathsf{P}^*\) on \(\mathsf{P}\) (p. 27). \(\mathrm{tr}(\mathsf{P})\) stands for the groupoid of \(\mathsf{P}\)-trees (see pp. 23--24). Given a polynomial monad \(\mathsf{P}\), \(\mathsf{P}^\circ\) is the Baez-Dolan construction on \(\mathsf{P}\), that is, a monad obtained from some adjunction by transport along an equivalence of categories (see 2.2.1 p. 31 for more details). \(\mathsf{S}\colon \mathbf{Grpd}\to\mathbf{Grpd}\) is the free-symmetric-monoidal-category endofunctor, which is a monad (p. 25): given a groupoid \(X\), \(\mathsf{S}X\) stands for the groupoids of ``monomials'' of objects in \(X\). For any operad, the two-sided bar construction \({Bar}_{\mathsf{S}}(\mathsf{R})\) is an \(\mathsf{S}\)-algebra in Segal spaces. \(Bar_{\mathsf{S}}(\mathsf{P}^*)\) and \(Bar_{\mathsf{S}}(\mathsf{P}^\circ)\) both are simplicial groupoids sharing the same groupoid in degree \(1\), namely \(\mathsf{S}(\mathrm{tr}(\mathsf{P}))\) of monomials \(\mathsf{P}\)-trees. Now decomposition spaces (which are particular simplicial groupoids) and thus also Segal groupoids, admit the incidence-coalgebra construction (pp. 17--18), that is, admit a homotopy-coherent coassociative comodule on a groupoid slice (that is a category of the form \(\mathbf{Grpd}_{/I}\)). When \(\mathsf{R}\) is an operad, the incidence-coalgebra structure on \({Bar}_{\mathsf{S}}(\mathsf{R})\) actually provides a bialgebra (with multiplication given by disjoint union, which is compatible with the comultiplication). In order to recover some usual constructions on vector spaces by taking cardinality, some finiteness conditions are needed (see for instance the notion of locally finite operads, p. 53), and this in turn needs a thorough, subtle and technical modification of the Baez-Dolan construction by considering a ``reduced'' version of it. All of this takes the form of a ``locally finite'' version of the Main Theorem 3.2.1 (see Theorem 4.3.6, p. 61), which is far from being immediate! In the last part of the paper, the author provides many examples to make connections with known constructions.