Beyond the Chu-construction (Q5930756)

The so-called Chu-construction of a *-autonomous category from an autonomous category has received much attention and study since it first appeared in the late 1970's. Most recently, \textit{M. Barr} (whose student Chu was) has returned to study the subject extending the construction to nonsymmetric *-autonomous categories [Theor. Comput. Sci. 139, No. 1-2, 115-130 (1995; Zbl 0874.18004)], and revisiting it further [Theor. Appl. Categ. 2, No.~2, 17-35 (1996; Zbl 0857.18009)]. The article under review tackles the Chu-construction from the perspective of bicategories. The first section develops the notion of a cyclic *-autonomous bicategory. This generalizes Barr's notion (the one-object bicategory case) and includes the bicategory \({\mathcal R}el\) of sets and relations (this example has been considered by the reviewer). Starting with such a cyclic *-autonomous bicategory \({\mathcal X}\), the author shows that the property of being cyclic *-autonomous carries over to the categories \({\mathcal X}\)-\(mnd\) and \({\mathcal X}\)-\(int\) of \({\mathcal X}\) monads and interpolants respectively, provided that \({\mathcal X}\) locally has coequalizers. The final section of the paper revisits the above-mentioned work of Barr in this new setting.