In the last couple of posts, I described how an extended TQFT gives a 2-vector space, with generators corresponding to particular states of matter, for each boundary of space (mostly talking about 1-D uboundaries of 2D space in 3D spacetime). I was starting to build up to talking about how cobordisms give rise to “spin network states” on space with given boundary conditions. Before I can do that, it’s probably helpful to talk about something a little more general. Since the general thing in question is something I’m developing a talk on to give in Iowa, this is helpful for me anyway.
A slightly more general thing has to do with spans of groupoids, and how to get 2-linear maps from them. A span in a category is a diagram like this:
Now, as for spans, let me first give a couple of link-outs (the blathyspherian version of a shout-out) to a couple of guys named John… Given a category with pullbacks, there is a (bi)category
, where spans are composed using pullbacks. John Armstrong recently posted about spans, describing
, which has the same objects as
, and morphisms which are spans in
.
In fact, it also has 2-morphisms, which are span maps – given two spans with central objects and
, a span map is a map from
to
which makes the resulting diagram commute. It turns out these make
into a bicategory – one of the classic examples, in fact, which goes back to Jean Benabou’s “Introduction to Bicategories” (1967) in which the concept was introduced. However, one can ignore these, and just think of it as a category, by taking spans only up to isomorphism.
John Baez recently posted some slides for a talk about spans in quantum mechanics, which gives a nice overview of the context that makes this stuff relevant to this discussion of TQFT. A key concept is summarized in the abstract:
Many features of quantum theory — quantum teleportation, violations of Bell’s inequality, the no-cloning theorem and so on — become less puzzling when we realize that quantum processes more closely resemble pieces of spacetime than functions between sets.
And the point both of them make is that cobordisms can be seen as spans (actually, cospans, although a cospan in is by definition a span in
). This is an important idea when thinking of TQFTs as functors, since
and
(or
) are symmetric monoidal categories with duals. A TQFT is a functor
, which respects exactly this structure. So it’s important that quantum processes are “like” these “pieces of spacetime”. And “pieces of spacetime” (cobordisms) have these properties is that, any time you start off with a cartesian category with pullbacks, like
, then taking spans in it gives you a symmetric monoidal category with duals.
What we’re really talking about are properties of (a) spans, and (b) certain free functors. In particular, free functors taking sets to vector spaces, groupoids to 2-vector spaces, and (potentially) so on. Both of these have something to do with how to go from a cartesian category like , or
(really a 2-category), to a monoidal category with duals (“dagger compact”), like
, or
(also a 2-category) – but also like
or
… I’ll describe what happens for sets, to keep things simple for this installment.
One example of going from a cartesian category to a dagger compact one is by the “free vector space” functor , taking a set
to
, the free vector space on
, and set maps to linear maps that just permute basis elements. Another is the process of taking
and building $\mathbf{Span(C)}$. The point is that these two can be related in a rather interesting way. In particular, there’s a functor
which acts on the objects of $\mathbf{Span(Sets)}$ (which are sets) just like the free-vector-space functor. That is, given a set , it gives
, the space of functions from
into
. (For simplicity, I’ll assume all my sets are finite).
But it does something rather special on morphisms in . These are spans of sets and therefore they have two morphisms in them. If we think of the span
as a morphism
in
, then the two arrows in the span are distinguished as first a “backwards” arrow, then a “forwards” arrow. The point is to take a vector in
– a complex-valued function on
, through the span.
So the question is, if I have a complex-valued function , how do I get a complex-valued function on
? Well, first, of course, I have to get one on
. Since I have a function
, the obvious candidate is
. Each element of
just gets the same complex number as its image down in
. That’s easy: we’ve “pulled back” the function
along
.
Now we have to transport this function down to , which is a little less obvious. A given object in
may have several different objects in
which map down to it, and no reason why they should all have the same function value under
. What can we do with a bunch of complex numbers? The two things which are most obvious are: add them up, or multiply them. The one we pick is to add them up (it may help to remember that the preimage of some object in
is the union, or coproduct, of a bunch of elements – and coproducts are like sums, just as products are like… well… products). The result is that we’ve “pushed forward” the function
along
, and the result is called
.
How do I know the process of taking a function – that is, a vector in
, and finding the vector
in
is a linear map? Well, it’s not too hard to check that it’s represented by a matrix, and the summation over the preimage of an object in
was the sum in the matrix multiplication. (Go ahead!) This works out very nicely because
is cartesian, so any span between
and
factors through the product
. In fact,
corresponds to an integer matrix, whose
component is the number of elements of
that project down to both
and
. (To get a general matrix, you’d have to give labels to the elements of
, which is something I talk about in this paper – the thing I like about which is that it gives lots of pictures which make “matrix mechanics” seem pretty natural – to me, anyway.)
It turns out this gives you a functor which represents inside $\latex \mathbf{Vect}$. In fact, to really get the bigger picture, instead of
in everything I’ve said here, you should replace
, and for
you should replace
. I’ll say something about that in the next installment – but “morally speaking” it’s much the same as what I’ve talked about here.
October 9, 2007 at 12:19 pm
You missed one of your TeX formulæ.
I’m going to be continuing talking about spans a bit, posting a few things as I work them out, but you might know if this has already been done. Basically, spans manage to “promote” structures pretty handily. A category becomes a bicategory. A monoidal category becomes a monoidal bicategory. And so on.
In particular, I’m sure (but using the blog as motivation for working this all out and verifying) that a braided monoidal category with duals becomes a braided monoidal bicategory with duals (subject to some compatibility conditions on the structure at the lower level), thus responding to Hendryk Pfeiffer’s question: Where is the braided monoidal 2-category?
But has someone already done this?
October 12, 2007 at 5:52 am
If so, I don’t know where.
October 16, 2007 at 3:53 am
I haven’t heard of anyone having gotten a braided monoidal bicategory with duals by taking spans in a braided monoidal category… and you’d sorta think I’d have heard of it, if anyone had.
I say: go for it, John!
October 16, 2007 at 6:49 pm
John, I think I have it, actually. The first steps are worked out on my own weblog, but when it came to adding duals I needed to extend the definition of 2-morphisms like this. In fact, now I don’t think I need to require that the monoidal structure on
preserves pullbacks anymore, since a tensorator naturally falls out.
However, the real world calls and I’ve had to back-burner this rather than working it out live. If you want, I can try explaining some of this over email, but it’s not ready for prime-time quite yet. I’m sure it works, but pushing through all the details gets messy (as I’m sure you know, since I’m cribbing generously from HDA4 as far as the method of proof goes).
October 21, 2007 at 11:40 pm
I see two some expressions in this post that didn’t get TeXed for some reason:
…building $\mathbf{Span(C)}$. The point is that…
….which acts on the objects of $\mathbf{Span(Sets)}$ (which are sets).
October 26, 2007 at 9:02 pm
[…] about the other leg of the span? Remember back in Part 1 what happened when we pushed down a function (not a functor) along the second leg of a span. To […]
April 29, 2008 at 11:38 pm
[…] days, in part to talk about spans and groupoids (basically, some cross section of the material in these posts here) at a conference put on by the Ottawa U math department, primarily for grad students and […]
December 15, 2009 at 9:08 pm
[…] December 15, 2009 Disintegrations Integrated and Operations on Categories of Sheaves Posted by Jeffrey Morton under 2-Hilbert Spaces, analysis, groupoids, papers, reading Leave a Comment Last week there was an interesting series of talks by Ivan Dynov about the classification of von Neumann algebras, and I’d like to comment on that, but first, since it’s been a while since I posted, I’ll catch up on some end-of-term backlog and post about some points I brought up a couple of weeks ago in a talk I gave in the Geometry seminar at Western. This was about getting Extended TQFT’s from groups, which I’ve posted about plenty previously . Mostly I talked about the construction that arises from “2-linearization” of spans of groupoids (see e.g. the sequence of posts starting here). […]