Formal aspects of Gray's tensor products of 2-categories (Q395676)

\textit{J. W. Gray} [Formal category theory: Adjointness for 2-categories. York: Springer-Verlag (1974; Zbl 0285.18006)] introduced a pair of monoidal products on 2-categories. The Gray tensor product is closed symmetric monoidal; its closures are 2-categories of 2-functors, pseudonatural transformations, and modifications. The lax Gray tensor product is not symmetric but is both left and right closed; its closures are 2-categories of 2-functors, (op)lax natural transformations, and modifications. This paper describes a general mechanism for producing biclosed monoidal structures on \(V\)-Cat, where \(V\) is a complete and cocomplete closed monoidal category. The category of \(V^{\Delta_+}\) of augmented cosimplicial objects in \(V\) admits the Day convolution product. To any comonoid \(C^\bullet\) in \(V^{\Delta_+}\) and pair \(A, B\) of small \(V\)-categories, the author defines a small \(V\)-category \(Coh^{C^\bullet}(A,B)\) whose objects are \(V\)-functors \(A \to B\) and whose homs are objects of \(V\)-coherent natural transformations, where the meaning of ``coherent'' is defined with respect to \(C^\bullet\). When \(C^\bullet\) is constant at the monoidal unit, coherent transformations are ordinary \(V\)-natural transformations. When \(C^\bullet\) is the embedding \(\Delta_+ \to\) Cat which maps each ordinal to the corresponding ordinal (poset) category, coherent transformations are lax natural transformations. When \(C^\bullet\) is the groupoid completion of the finite ordinals, coherent transformations are pseudonatural transformations. Generalizing the situation for the (lax) Gray tensor products, these internal homs are adjoint to monoidal products on \(V\)-Cat, again defined with respect to \(C^\bullet\). This assignment is also functorial in the category of comonoids in \(V^{\Delta_+}\).