Shadows and traces in bicategories (Q382402)

The classical trace of a square matrix over a field was generalized to traces in symmetric monoidal categories. These symmetric monoidal traces have many applications; for instance, their functoriality directly implies the Lefschetz theorem. There are also ``noncommutative traces'', such as the Hattori-Stallings trace for modules over a noncommutative rings. This paper studies a generalization of the symmetric monoidal trace which applies to noncommutative situations; its context is a bicategory equipped with an extra structure called a ``shadow''. These new traces are functorial, which is essential to applications in fixed-point theory.