Marino Gran (Université catholique de Louvain) will give a talk on
Semi-abelian categories, cocommutative Hopf algebras and Hopf braces
Abstract:
In this talk I’ll present some recent results on the interactions between Hopf algebra theory and semi-abelian categories.
Semi-abelian categories [1] have played a central role in categorical algebra during the last 25 years. After recalling the motivation for studying them, some basic concepts and a few examples, we shall explain why the category of cocommutative Hopf algebras is semi-abelian [2]. We shall then turn our attention to (cocommutative) Hopf braces [3], which can be seen as a Hopf-theoretic generalization of skew braces [4], that are useful to study solutions of the Yang-Baxter equation. Hopf braces can also be thought as a natural generalization of Hopf algebras.
In the recent article with Andrea Sciandra [5] we have investigated the exactness properties of the category of Hopf braces, and some natural constructions. First, we show that cocommutative Hopf braces form a semi-abelian category, that is also strongly protomodular. When the base field is algebraically closed and has zero characteristic one can find an interesting torsion theory therein, whose torsion-free subcategory is equivalent to the variety of skew braces, which turns out to be also a localization. Finally, we provide some explicit descriptions of the categorical commutator and of the central extensions of Hopf braces, that are likely to be useful for some new applications in non-abelian (co)homology theory.
References
[1] G. Janelidze, L. Marki and W. Tholen, Semi-abelian categories, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 168 (2002) 367-386
[2] M. Gran, F. Sterck and J. Vercruysse, A semi-abelian extension of a theorem by Takeuchi, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 223 (2019) 4171-4190
[3] I. Angiono, C. Galindo, L. Vendramin, Hopf braces and Yang-Baxter operators, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 145 (2017) 1981-1995
[4] L. Guarnieri, L. Vendramin, Skew braces and the Yang-Baxter equation. Math. Comp. 86 (2017) 2519-2534
[5] M. Gran and A. Sciandra, Semi-abelian categories and Hopf braces, preprint, arXiv:2411.19238 (2024)