Bicategorical homotopy fiber sequences (Q2255533)

To any bicategory \(\mathcal{B}\) one can associate a classifying space \(B\mathcal{B}\), which consists of a CW complex whose cells reflect topologically the structure of \(\mathcal{B}\). Bicategorical coherence constraints are then sent to homotopy coherence relations, in the sense that the classifying space construction sends every lax or oplax functor \(F:\mathcal{A}\rightarrow\mathcal{B}\) between two bicategories to a continuous map \(BF:B\mathcal{A}\rightarrow B\mathcal{B}\) and every natural transformation \(\tau:F\Rightarrow F'\) to a homotopy between the maps \(BF\) and \(BF'\). The goal of the present paper is to get a better understanding of the homotopy type of such classifying spaces by studying the homotopy fibers of such maps \(BF\). For this, the authors generalize Quillen's Theorems A and B to this bicategorical context (Theorems 5.4 and 5.6 in this article). The general plan of the proof follows Quillen's argument line. However, there is a major technical gap induced by the fact that horizontal composition of \(1\)-morphisms in a bicategory is not strictly associative, and lax functors does not preserve strictly such compositions. The main tool used to overcome this difficulty is the notion of lax bidiagram of bicategories, which consists of a lax functor from a given bicategory (the shape of the diagram) to the tricategory of small bicategories. In this bicategorical framework, such a functor plays a role analogous to a diagram of small categories in the \(1\)-categorical setting. The authors perform with this notion a bicategorical analogue of the Grothendieck construction on lax diagrams of categories. Moreover, these methods enable the authors to recover well known results about classifying spaces of monoidal categories, namely MacLane-Stasheff's theorem identifying under some assumptions the classifying space of a monoidal category with the delooping of the classifying space of its underlying category.