Ambidextrous objects and trace functions for nonsemisimple categories (Q2845445)

Let \(\Bbbk\) be a field and \(\mathcal{C}\) an additive pivotal \(\Bbbk\)-category having the property that all indecomposable objects are absolutely indecomposable, and that the radical of the endomorphism ring of an absolutely indecomposable object consists of only nilpotent elements. Under this set of conditions several necessary and sufficient conditions for an absolutely simple object in \(\mathcal{C}\) to be right ambidextrous are given. As a biproduct, in the case when \(\mathcal{C}\) is, moreover, additive, with enough projectives and contains absolutely simple projective objects, the authors find conditions under which Proj admits a unique non-zero right trace. (Here Proj is the notation for the full subcategory of \(\mathcal{C}\) consisting of the projective objects of \(\mathcal{C}\)). Actually, it is shown that every absolutely simple projective object is right ambidextrous if and only if \(\mathcal{C}\) is unimodular, and if this is the case then the existence of a unique non-zero right trace on Proj is guaranteed by the existence of an absolutely simple projective object \(L\) for which the evaluation morphism \(\widetilde{ev}_L\) that appears in the definition of its right dual object is an epimorphism. The result is applied in a variety of settings: representations of factorizable ribbon Hopf algebras, finite groups and their quantum doubles, Lie (super)algebras, the \((1, p)\) minimal model in conformal field theory and quantum groups at a root of unity, respectively.