On the category of props (Q2516574)

This paper lays the foundational framework to instantiate a homotopy theory of props. It is part of the authors' greater project (since continued in several papers and a monograph) to carefully and categorically describe the structures underlying most classes of algebras. The specific results in this paper are likely to be used directly only by experts, but the eventual applications, as realized in ensuing work, are potentially far-reaching. \textit{Props} were invented over fifty years ago as a formalism to describe field theories in an ambient symmetric monoidal category. They are sufficiently universal that they can describe most natural kinds of algebraic, coalgebraic, and bialgebraic structures, broadly construed. Props give a formalism for spaces of operations with \(m\) inputs and \(n\) outputs with the structure of symmetric group actions and an associative, unital composition. For a number of reasons, in the years after their invention, props were rarely analyzed directly. At that time, the available technology made them difficult to work with. Moreover, working in a Cartesian monoidal category, such as sets and topological spaces, a representation of a prop is determined by operations from \(m\) inputs to a single output. Adding the constraint \(n=1\) to the idea of a prop yields a potentially simpler algebraic structure, an \textit{operad}. Operad theory was developed and used to great effect in algebraic topology in the 1970s. Since the 1990s, there has been renewed interest in props and prop-like structures in chain complexes over a field of characteristic zero. Powerful tools have been constructed to analyze linear operads as well as other similar structures such as \textit{half-props}, \textit{dioperads}, and \textit{properads}. However, the focus on the particular ground category has meant that the area lacks constructions, descriptions, and arguments that are more or less insensitive to that background choice. The work under review, while explicitly working in the category of sets, provides such arguments, and establishes the existence of limits, colimits, internal hom objects, and an adjoint symmetric monoidal product for the category of colored props in sets. All of this is clearly consistent with extant constructions for operads and with potential enrichments in other categories. The authors use the formalism of \textit{megagraphs} and also describe a free prop functor in this setting. This suite of results constitutes the necessary ingredients to begin asking about a meaningful homotopy theory for props in a category that is itself homotopical. This paves the way for the construction (in later work) of coherent, consistent comparisons of the categories of representations of different props (that is, different categories of field theories).