Comparison of Waldhausen constructions (Q2045749)

The authors present a version of the \(S_\bullet\)-construction which unifies various other variants that have appeared previously, in particular for stable \(\infty\)-categories and exact (\(\infty\)-)categories. For this purpose, they introduce the notion of augmented stable double Segal spaces. These are augmented bisimplicial spaces \(X\) which satisfy the Segal condition with respect to both simplicial directions and additionally satisfy the following conditions: \begin{itemize} \item[(1)] the canonical maps (one induced by the two instances of \(d_0\), the other by \(d_1\)) \[ X_{1,0} \times_{X_{0,0}} X_{0,1} \leftarrow X_{1,1} \to X_{0,1} \times_{X_{0,0}} X_{1,0} \] are equivalences; \item[(2)] both \[ X_{1,0} \times_{X_{0,0}} X_{-1} \xrightarrow{\mathrm{pr}} X_{0,1} \xrightarrow{d_1} X_{0,0} \] and \[ X_{0,1} \times_{X_{0,0}} X_{-1} \xrightarrow{\mathrm{pr}} X_{0,1} \xrightarrow{d_0} X_{0,0} \] are equivalences, where the first pullback is taken along \(d_0\), the second along \(d_1\). \end{itemize} The indexing category for augmented bisimplicial objects admits a canonical functor to the simplex category \(\Delta\) (given by ordinal sum), and the authors define the \(S_\bullet\)-construction as the associated right Kan extension functor. They then go on to show that exact (\(\infty\)-)categories as well as stable \(\infty\)-categories give rise to such augmented stable double Segal spaces, and that their \(S_\bullet\)-construction agrees with previous incarnations of the \(S_\bullet\)-construction in the respective setting. They also show that these constructions are compatible among each other in the expected way (eg when considering a stable \(\infty\)-category as an exact \(\infty\)-category). Moreover, they show that the relative \(S_\bullet\)-construction for exact functors between exact categories can be recovered from the \(S_\bullet\)-construction for augmented stable double Segal spaces.