Monoidal structures on the categories of quadratic data (Q2208980)

This paper gives several (co)lax 2-monoidal structures on categories of quadratic data, and several constructions of (co)operads are detailed, recovering important examples from the literature. In Section 2, a definition is given for ``quadratic data'', which is essentially the presentation data of an associative algebra. There are also symmetric and skew-symmetric quadratic data, which present commutative and Lie algebras respectively. Several monoidal structures are defined on each of these categories, as well as several monoidal functors relating them and the categories of algebras they present, including the universal enveloping algebra functor, and Koszul duality functors. In Section 3, they give the required interchange law maps to assemble some of these monoidal structures into lax 2-monoidal structures. A lax 2-monoidal structure on a category is a generalization of duoidal categories which allows the interchange law \(\phi_{A,A',B,B'} \colon (A \otimes A') \boxtimes (B \otimes B') \to (A \boxtimes B) \otimes (A' \boxtimes B')\) to not necessarily be an isomorphism. In Section 4, they introduce the category of binary operadic quadratic data as well as multiple (co)lax 2-monoidal structures on it. Section 5 discusses how to obtain quadratic data from topological operads. This is done by applying the Magnus construction to the fundamental group. In this way, they are able to construct many operads of interest, such as the genus zero quantum cohomology operad and the operad classiyfing Gerstenhaber algebras.