Monoidal abelian envelopes and a conjecture of Benson and Etingof (Q2112371)

If a given category \(\mathcal{C}\) is not abelian, it is natural to ask whether it admits an embedding into an abelian category \(\mathcal{A}\) in a minimal or universal way. While there are some general results about the existence of such abelian envelopes under some assumptions on the category \(\mathcal{C}\), not much is known if one assumes the category \(\mathcal{C}\) or the abelian category \(\mathcal{A}\) is monoidal. The authos give several criteria to decide whether a given tensor category is the abelian envelope of a fixed symmetric monoidal category. The authors prove that the category of finite-dimensional representations of a semisimple simply-connected algebraic group is the abelian envelope of the category of tilting modules. \textit{D. Benson} and \textit{P. Etingof} [Adv. Math. 351, 967--999 (2019; Zbl 1430.18013)] conjectured that a certain limit of finite symmetric tensor categories is tensor equivalent to the finite dimensional representations of \(\mathsf{SL}_2\) in characteristic \(2\). They use their results on the abelian envelopes to prove this conjecture and its variants for any prime \(p\).