Representations of fusion categories and their commutants (Q6103426)

The paper under review studies commutant categories associated to fully faithful representations of unitary fusion categories. It also introduces the notion of a positive structure on a bi-involutive tensor categories, based on the notion of completely positive maps introduced by Selinger. In this setting, the article establishes results which can be interpreted as categorifications of well-known results on von Neumann algebras. A bi-involutive \(C^{\ast}\)-tensor category \(\mathcal{C}\) is a dagger tensor category with an involutive dagger functor \(\overline{\, \cdot \,}\). If \(\mathcal{C}\) is rigid, then it is canonically bi-involutive, with canonical evaluation and coevaluation morphisms, which, as is shown in the paper, induces a positive structure. Similarly, it is shown that the category \(\operatorname{Bim}(R)\) of separable bimodules over a von Neumann algebra \(R\) admits a canonical positive structure. A representation \(\alpha: \mathcal{C} \rightarrow \operatorname{Bim}(R)\) of \(\mathcal{C}\) is positive if it respects the positive structures, and it is shown that a fully faithful representation uniquely extends to a positive one, and that isomorphisms of representations respect positive structures. The commutant \(\mathcal{C}'\) of \(\mathcal{C}\) with respect to a representation \(\alpha\) is an analogue of the centralizer of \(\mathcal{C}\) in \(\operatorname{Bim}(R)\), similarly to how the Drinfeld center is an analogue of the center of a monoid. A bicommutant category is a pair \((\mathcal{C},\alpha)\) such that the inclusion \(\mathcal{C} \hookrightarrow \mathcal{C}''\) is an equivalence. The article emphasizes the categorification perspective, which parallels bicommutant categories with von Neumann algebras, \(C^{\ast}\)-tensor categories with \(C^{\ast}\)-algebras, \(W^{\ast}\) categories (i.e. categories of the form \(R\operatorname{-mod}\)) with Hilbert spaces and the category \(\operatorname{Bim}(R)\) with the \(\ast\)-algebra \(B(H)\) of bounded operators on a Hilbert space \(H\). Given fully faithful representations \(\alpha: \mathcal{C} \rightarrow \operatorname{Bim}(R)\) and \(\beta: \mathcal{D} \rightarrow \operatorname{Bim}(S)\) of Morita equivalent unitary fusion categories, where \(R,S\) are both hyperfinite factors of type II, or of type III\(_{1}\), the paper establishes a bi-involutive, positive equivalence between the respective commutants \(\mathcal{C}'\) and \(\mathcal{D}'\). From the categorification point of view, this can be viewed as a counterpart to the fact that if an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space \(H\) is separable, and \(A,B\) are Morita equivalent subalgebras of \(B(H)\) whose central projections are infinite, then the commutants \(A',B'\) are isomorphic.