A note on strong protomodularity, actions and quotients (Q308141)

The paper under review is devoted to the investigation of the categorical properties related to two well-known aspects of group actions, i.e., actions on quotients and actions of quotients. This line of investigation lead the authors to the study of some classifying aspects of the fibration of points and to the study of the exactness properties of the kernel functor \({\mathcal K}_{A}\) associated to the change of base along the initial arrow \(!_{A}:0\rightarrow A\) where \(A\) is an object in a finitely complete category with initial object \(0\). One of the main results of this paper is presented in Proposition 3.3 in the following way. Let \({\mathcal C}\) be a quasipointed regular category, then the statements 1) The category \({\mathcal C}\) is protomodular, and 2) The functor \({\mathcal K}_{A}\) reflects short exact sequences for all \(A\) in \({\mathcal C}\), are equivalent. As a consequence, a characterization for strongly semi-abelian categories was obtained in Proposition 3.6. If \({\mathcal C}\) is a a semi-abelian category, the category \({\mathcal C}\) is strongly semi-abelian if and only if the kernel functor \({\mathcal K}_{A}\) lifts the cokernels of \({\mathcal K}_{A}\)-kernels for all \(A\) in \({\mathcal C}\). The second relevant result of this paper (see Theorem 5.5) is derived directly from Proposition 3.6. In this theorem a characterization of strong protomodularity was obtained for semi-abelian categories in the following way: If \({\mathcal C}\) is a semi-abelian category, \({\mathcal C}\) is strongly protomodular if and only if for any \(A\)-action \(\xi\) on an object \(Y\), and for any normal subobject \(X\) of \(Y\) such that \(\xi\) restricts \(X\), \(\xi\) induces an action on the quotient \(Y/X\). Finally, in section 4, for strongly semi-abelian categories, the authors study the problem of determining the conditions under which is possible to factor the change of base functor of the fibration of points along a regular epimorphism as an equivalence of categories followed by a full embedding.