Introduction
Pr´e-Publica¸c~oesdo Departamento de Matem´atica Universidade de Coimbra Preprint Number 19{19 DESCENT DATA AND ABSOLUTE KAN EXTENSIONS FERNANDO LUCATELLI NUNES Abstract: The fundamental construction underlying descent theory, the lax de- scent category, comes with a functor that forgets the descent data. We prove that, in any 2-category A with lax descent objects, the forgetful morphisms create all absolute Kan extensions. As a consequence of this result, we get a monadicity theo- rem which says that a right adjoint functor is monadic if and only if it is, up to the composition with an equivalence, a functor that forgets descent data. In particular, within the classical context of descent theory, we show that, in a fibred category, the forgetful functor between the category of internal actions of a precategory a and the category of internal actions of the underlying discrete precategory is monadic if and only if it has a left adjoint. This proves that one of the implications of the cele- brated B´enabou-Roubaud theorem does not depend on the so called Beck-Chevalley condition. Namely, we show that, in a fibred category with pullbacks, whenever an effective descent morphism induces a right adjoint functor, the functor is monadic. Keywords: effective descent morphisms, internal actions, indexed categories, cre- ation of absolute Kan extensions, Beck's monadicity theorem, B´enabou-Roubaud theorem, descent theory, monadicity theorem. Math. Subject Classification (2010): 18D05, 18C15, 18A22, 18A30, 18A40, 18F99, 11R32, 13B05. Introduction The (lax) descent objects [44, 46, 33, 36], the 2-dimensional limits underly- ing descent theory [18, 19, 23, 46, 34], play an important role in 2-dimensional universal algebra [27, 6, 30, 32].
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