INTERNAL CATEGORIES, ANAFUNCTORS and LOCALISATIONS in Memory of Luanne Palmer (1965-2011)
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
INTERNAL CATEGORIES, ANAFUNCTORS AND LOCALISATIONS In memory of Luanne Palmer (1965-2011) DAVID MICHAEL ROBERTS Abstract. TO DO: Rewrite abstract. Write introduction. Finish examples section, in particular, track down references to literature where the main theorem is used (Pronk, Carchedi, Colman...) Make sure all references in bibliography are used, delete if not. Use hyperref package? Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Sites and internal categories 2 3 Internal categories 5 4 Anafunctors 10 5 Localising bicategories at a class of 1-cells 17 6 2-categories of internal categories admit bicategories of fractions 20 7 Examples 24 A Superextensive sites 29 1. Introduction It is a well-known result of classical category theory that a functor is an equivalence if and only if it is fully faithful and essentially surjective. The proof of this fact requires the axiom of choice. Whatever one's position on this axiom is, one situation where Choice is lacking is when dealing with internal categories and groupoids. We can recover this result by localising at (i.e. formally inverting) the class of fully faithful and essentially surjective functors. Since surjectivity is a concept that doesn't generalise straightforwardly from Set, we consider instead a class of arrows E which plays the r^oleof the surjections. We shall call these weak equivalences (see [Bunge-Par´e,1979]). Note however that what is needed here is not localisation as given in [Gabriel-Zisman, 1967], but a 2-categorical localisation. An Australian Postgraduate Award provided financial support during part of the time the material for this paper was written. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary 18D99;Secondary 18F10, 18D05, 22A22. Key words and phrases: internal categories, anafunctors, localization, bicategory of fractions. c David Michael Roberts, 2011. Permission to copy for private use granted. 1 2 In [Bunge-Par´e,1979] the interest in weak equivalences is to do with the `stack com- pletion' of an internal category or groupoid, but it is from the theory of geometric stacks that we find the necessary construction to localise a 2-category. It is a common idea that algebraic stacks are internal groupoids up to weak equivalence. This was made precice in [Pronk, 1996] where Pronk proved that the 2-category of algebraic stacks is a localisation of a certain 2-category of groupoid schemes, as well as analogous results for topological and smooth stacks. It is for this reason that we are interested not only in the 2-categories Cat(S) and Gpd(S) of all internal categories or groupoids in S respectively, but certain sub-2- categories Cat0(S) ⊂ Cat(S), which may or may not consist entirely of groupoids. Note that because we wish to recover Lie groupoids as a special case of the results here, we will not assume the ambient category is finitely complete. This does not introduce any complications. This article started out based on material from the author's PhD thesis. Many thanks are due to Michael Murray, Mathai Varghese and Jim Stasheff, supervisors to the author. The patrons of the n-Category Caf´eand nLab, especially Mike Shulman, with whom this work was shared in development, provided helpful input. 2. Sites and internal categories The idea of localness is inherent in many constructions in algebraic topology and algebraic geometry. For an abstract category the concept of `local' is encoded by a Grothendieck pretopology. Localness is needed to be able to talk about local sections of a map in a category { a concept that will replace surjectivity when moving from Set to more general categories. This section gathers definitions and notations for later use. 2.1. Definition. A Grothendieck pretopology (or simply pretopology) on a category S is a collection J of families f(Ui / A)i2I gA2Obj(S) of morphisms for each object A 2 S satisfying the following properties ∼ 1. (A0 / A) is in J for every isomorphism A0 ' A. 2. Given a map B / A, for every (Ui / A)i2I in J the pullbacks B ×A Ai exist and (B ×A Ai / B)i2I is in J. i 3. For every (Ui / A)i2I in J and for a collection (Vk / Ui)k2Ki from J for each i 2 I, the family of composites i (Vk / A)k2Ki;i2I are in J. 3 Families in J are called covering families. A category S equipped with a pretopology J is called a site, denoted (S; J). The pretopology J is called a singleton pretopology if every covering family consists of a single arrow (U / A). In this case a covering family is called a cover and we call (S; J) a unary site. We do not assume that the collection of covering families for each object is a set (or small set, depending on one's choice of foundations). Very often, one sees the definition of a pretopology as being an assignment of a set covering families to each object. However, when dealing with singleton pretopologies, one can define it as a subcategory with certain properties, and there is not necessarily a set of covers for each object. One example is the category of groups with surjective homomorphisms as covers. This distinction will be important later. 2.2. Example. The prototypical example is the pretopology O on Top, where a covering family is an open cover. The class of numerable open covers (i.e. those that admit a subordinate partition of unity [Dold, 1963]) also forms a pretopology on Top. Much of traditional bundle theory is carried out using this site; for example the Milnor classifying space classifies bundles which are locally trivial over numerable covers. 2.3. Definition. A covering family (Ui / A)i2I is called effective if A is the colimit of the following diagram: the objects are the Ui and the pullbacks Ui ×A Uj, and the arrows are the projections Ui Ui ×A Uj / Uj: If the covering family consists of a single arrow (U / A), this is the same as saying U / A is a regular epimorphism. 2.4. Definition. A site is called subcanonical if every covering family is effective. 2.5. Example. On Top, the usual pretopology O of opens, the pretopology of numerable covers and that of open surjections are subcanonical. 2.6. Example. In a regular category, the class of regular epimorphisms forms a sub- canonical singleton pretopology. 2.7. Definition. Let (S; J) be a site. An arrow P / A in S is called a J-epimorphism if there is a covering family (Ui / A)i2I and a lift P ? Ui / A for every i 2 I.A J-epimorphism is called universal its pullback along an arbitrary map exists. We denote the class of universal J-epimorphisms by Jun. 4 The definition of J-epimorphism is equivalent to the definition in III.7.5 in [Mac Lane- Moerdijk, 1992]. The dotted maps in the above definition are called local sections, after the case of the usual open cover pretopology on Top. If J is a singleton pretopology, it is clear that J ⊂ Jun. 2.8. Example. The universal O-epimorphisms for the pretopology O of open covers on Diff is Subm, the pretopology of surjective submersions. Sometimes a pretopology J contains a smaller pretopology that still has enough covers to compute the same J-epimorphisms. 2.9. Definition. If J and K are two singleton pretopologies with J ⊂ K, such that K ⊂ Jun, then J is said to be cofinal in K. Clearly J is cofinal in Jun for any singleton pretopology J. 2.10. Lemma. If J is cofinal in K, then Jun = Kun. As mentioned earlier, one may be given a singleton pretopology such that each object has more than a set's worth of covers. If such a pretopology contains a cofinal pretopology with set-many covers for each object, then we can pass to the smaller pretopology and recover the same results. In fact, we can get away with something weaker: one could ask only that the category of all covers of an object (see definition 2.13 below) has a set of weakly initial objects, and such set may not form a pretopology. This is the content of the axiom WISC below. We first give some more precise definitions. 2.11. Definition. A category C has a weakly initial set I of objects if for every object A of C there is an arrows O / A from some object O 2 I. Every small category has a weakly initial set, namely its set of objects. 2.12. Example. The large category Fields of fields has a weakly initial set, consisting of the prime fields fQ; Fpjp primeg. To contrast, the category of sets with surjections for arrows doesn't have a weakly initial set of objects. We pause only to remark that the statement of the adjoint functor theorem can be expressed in terms of weakly initial sets. 2.13. Definition. Let (S; J) be a site. For any object A, the category of covers of A, denoted J=A has as objects the covering families (Ui / A)i2I and as morphisms (Ui / A)i2I / (Vj / A)j2J tuples consisting of a function r : I / J and arrows Ui / Vr(i) in S=A. When J is a singleton pretopology this is simply a full subcategory of S=A. We now define the axiom WISC (Weakly Initial Set of Covers), due independently to Mike Shulman and Thomas Streicher. 5 2.14. Definition. A site (S; J) is said to satisfy WISC if for every object A of S, the category J=A has a weakly initial set of objects.