Graded extensions of monoidal categories (Q5945575)

In this note the authors generalize the well known results of Schreier-Eilenberg-Mac Lane on group extensions to a categorical level. More precisely, let \(\Gamma \) be a group and \(({\mathcal C}, \otimes)\) a monoidal category. The authors show that any \(\Gamma \)-monoidal extension of \(({\mathcal C}, \otimes)\) is equivalent to a crossed product extension \((\Delta (\theta , F), j)\) for some factor set \((\theta , F)\). Moreover, the map that carries a factor set \((\theta , F)\) to the corresponding crossed product extension \(\Delta (\theta , F)\) provides a bijection from the non-abelian cohomology set of \(\Gamma \) over \(({\mathcal C}, \otimes)\), \(\mathbb{H}(\Gamma , ({\mathcal C}, \otimes))\), to the set of equivalence classes of \(\Gamma \)-monoidal extensions of the monoidal category \(({\mathcal C}, \otimes)\), \(\text{Ext}(\Gamma , ({\mathcal C}, \otimes))\). Secondly, they construct the Teichmüller obstruction map from the set of collective characters \(\wp \) to a certain \(3\)-dimensional group cohomology class \(\text{H}^3_{\wp }(\Gamma , Z({\mathcal C}, \otimes)^*)\) and show that the set \(\text{Ext}_{\wp }(\Gamma , ({\mathcal C}, \otimes))\) is non-empty if and only if its obstruction vanishes, and if \(\wp \) is unobstructed then \(\text{Ext}_{\wp }(\Gamma , ({\mathcal C}, \otimes))\) is a principal homogeneous space under the abelian group \(\text{H}^2_{\wp }(\Gamma , Z({\mathcal C}, \otimes)^*)\). These general results are applied to grade extensions of the monoidal category of modules over a \(k\)-bialgebra; in particular, the strongly graded bialgebras are classified by group cohomology.