Internal natural transformations and Frobenius algebras in the Drinfeld center (Q6155898)

Module and bimodule categories are an important tool used for example in representation theory, conformal field theory and topological field theory. In particular finite ones over finite tensor categories offer a natural setting to study finite-dimensional representations over finite dimensional Hopf algebras. It is an established fact that the category \(\mathcal{R}ex_\mathcal{C}(\mathcal{M},\mathcal{N})\) of right exact modules between finite module categories over a finite tensor category is itself a finite module category over the Drinfeld center \(\mathcal{Z}(\mathcal{C})\). In this paper, the authors study the internal homs \(\underline{\mathrm{Hom}}(G,H)\) for \(G,H \in \mathcal{R}ex_\mathcal{C}(\mathcal{M},\mathcal{N})\), that they call internal natural transformations and denote by \(\underline{\mathrm{Nat}}(F,G)\). Since internal homs are defined as right adjoint to the action functor, internal natural transformations are objects of \(\mathcal{Z}(\mathcal{C})\) verifying for any \(z \in \mathcal{Z}(\mathcal{C})\), \[ \mathrm{Hom}_{\mathcal{R}ex_\mathcal{C}(\mathcal{M},\mathcal{N})}(z\cdot F,G) \simeq \mathrm{Hom}_{\mathcal{Z}(\mathcal{C})}(z, \underline{\mathrm{Nat}(F,G)}) \] One of the main result of the paper, namely Theorem 9, is that the usual formula obtained via the Yoneda lemma \[ \mathrm{Nat}(F,G) = \int_{m \in \mathcal{M}} \mathrm{Hom}_{\mathcal{N}}(F(m),G(m)) \] can be internalised in \(\mathcal{Z}(\mathcal{C})\) \[ \underline{\mathrm{Nat}}(F,G) = \int_{m \in \mathcal{M}} \underline{\mathrm{Hom}}_{\mathcal{N}}(F(m),G(m)) \] It is also proven that internal natural endotransformations \(\underline{\mathrm{Nat}}(F,F)\) have in addition the structure of a unital associative algebra in \(\mathcal{Z}(\mathcal{C})\) which is commutative for \(F = \mathrm{Id}_\mathcal{M}\). After having studied the general case, the authors consider exact modules over pivotal finite tensor categories. In this case, \(\mathcal{R}ex_\mathcal{C}(\mathcal{M},\mathcal{N})\) is also an exact module and it is pivotal when \(\mathcal{C}\) is unimodular. Under those assumptions \(\underline{\mathrm{Nat}}(F,F)\) is a Frobenius algebra and \(\underline{\mathrm{Nat}}(\mathrm{Id}_\mathcal{M},\mathrm{Id}_\mathcal{M})\) a commutative Frobenius algebra. Thus module categories offer a source of Frobenius algebras in \(\mathcal{Z}(\mathcal{C})\). Some motivation of this work for the description of bulk fields in rigid logarithmic two-dimensional conformal field theories is briefly discussed in the introduction of the paper. The details of which will be considered elsewhere.