Modular Categories∗
Modular Categories∗ M. M¨uger IMAPP, Radboud University Nijmegen The Netherlands February 13, 2012 1 Introduction Modular categories, as well as the (possibly) more general non-degenerate braided fusion categories, are braided tensor categories that are linear over a field and satisfy some natural additional axioms, like existence of duals, semisimplicity, finiteness, and an important non-degeneracy condition. (Precise definitions will be given later.) There are several reasons to study modular categories: • As will hopefully become clear, they are rather interesting mathematical structures in themselves, well worth being studied for intrinsic reasons. For example, there are interesting number theoretic aspects. • Among the braided fusion categories, modular categories are the opposite extreme of the symmetric fusion categories, which are well known to be closely related to finite groups. Studying these two extreme cases is also helpful for understanding and classifying those braided fusion categories that are neither symmetric nor modular. • Modular categories serve as input datum for the Reshetikhin-Turaev construction of topological quantum field theories in 2+1 dimensions and therefore give rise to invariants of smooth 3-manifolds. This goes some way towards making Witten's interpretation of the Jones polynomial via Chern-Simons QFT rigorous. (But since there still is no complete rigorous non-perturbative construction of the Chern-Simons QFTs by conventional quantum field theory methods, there also is no proof of their equivalence to the RT-TQFTs constructed using the representation theory of quantum groups.) • Modular categories arise as representation categories of loop groups and, more generally, of rational chiral conformal quantum field theories. In chiral CQFT, the field theory itself, its representation category, and the conformal characters form a remarkably tightly connected structure.
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