Slightly trivial extensions of a fusion category
Jingcheng Dong

TL;DR
This paper introduces the concept of slightly trivial extensions of fusion categories, exploring their properties and providing examples from rank 3 fusion categories, thus advancing understanding of fusion category extensions.
Contribution
It defines and studies slightly trivial extensions of fusion categories, offering initial insights and concrete examples from rank 3 categories.
Findings
Defined slightly trivial extensions of fusion categories.
Provided two explicit examples from rank 3 categories.
Laid groundwork for further exploration of fusion category extensions.
Abstract
We introduce and study the notion of slightly trivial extensions of a fusion category which can be viewed as the first level of complexity of extensions. We also provide two examples of slightly trivial extensions which arise from rank fusion categories.
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Taxonomy
TopicsAlgebraic structures and combinatorial models · Homotopy and Cohomology in Algebraic Topology · Advanced Topics in Algebra
Slightly trivial extensions of a fusion category
Jingcheng Dong
College of Mathematics and Statistics, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
Abstract.
We introduce and study the notion of slightly trivial extensions of a fusion category which can be viewed as the first level of complexity of extensions. We also provide two examples of slightly trivial extensions which arise from rank fusion categories.
Key words and phrases:
Fusion category; Extension; Ising category
2010 Mathematics Subject Classification:
18D10
1. Introduction
Let be a finite group and be the identity of . A fusion category is -graded if there is a decomposition of into a direct sum of full abelian subcategories, such that and for all .
The grading is called faithful if for all . A fusion category is called a -extension of if there is a faithful grading , such that the trivial component is equivalent to . If is trivial then is equivalent to . In this case, we call is a trivial extension of .
In this paper, we introduce the new notion of slightly trivial extensions of a fusion category, which can be viewed as the first level of complexity of extensions, except the trivial extension. Let be a -extension of a fusion category . We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for being a slightly trivial extension of . In particular, if the largest pointed fusion subcategory is trivial and is a slightly trivial extension of , then admits an exact factorization. When is a slightly trivial extension of and the Grothendieck ring of is commutative, we also obtain the fusion rules of in terms of that of . In the last section of this paper, we provide two examples of slightly trivial extensions which arise from rank fusion categories.
2. Preliminaries
2.1. Frobenius-Perron dimensions
Let be a fusion category. We shall denote by the set of isomorphism classes of simple objects in . The set is a basis of the Grothendieck ring of . The cardinal number of is called the rank of and is denoted by .
Let be a fusion category and let be a simple object of . The Frobenius-Perron dimension of is defined as the Frobenius-Perron eigenvalue of the matrix of left multiplication by the class of in the basis . The Frobenius-Perron dimension of is . The following lemma is due to Müger, see [2, Remark 8.4].
Lemma 2.1**.**
Let be a simple object of a fusion category. Then . In particular, if then for some integer .
A simple object of a fusion category is invertible if , where is the dual of and 1 is the trivial simple object of . It is obvious that a simple object is invertible if and only if . A fusion category is pointed if all of its simple objects are invertible. Let be a fusion category. We shall denote by the largest pointed fusion subcategory of , and by the group of isomorphism classes of invertible objects of . It is clear that generates as a fusion subcategory.
The class of pointed fusion categories has been classified (see e. g. [5]). Let be a finite group, be a cohomology class in , and be the category of finite dimensional vector spaces graded by with associativity determined by . It is shown that a pointed fusion category is equivalent to some .
2.2. Exact factorizations of fusion categories
Let be a fusion category, and let be fusion subcategories of . Let be the full abelian (not necessarily tensor) subcategory of spanned by direct summands in , where and . We say that factorizes into a product of and if . A factorization of is called exact if , and is denoted by , see [3].
By [3, Theorem 3.8], is an exact factorization if and only every simple object of can be uniquely expressed in the form , where and .
3. Slightly trivial extensions
Let be a fusion category with . Let be an extension of . We say that the component is similar to if there exists an invertible simple object such that . If all components are similar to then we say that is a slightly trivial extension of .
Proposition 3.1**.**
Let be an extension of a fusion category . Then the component is similar to if and only if contains an invertible simple object. In particular, is a slightly trivial extension of if and only if every component contains an invertible simple object.
Proof.
Assume that contains an invertible simple object . Let . Then are nonisomorphic simple objects in . Since , and , we conclude that . Hence is similar to .
The other direction is obvious, by the definition of a slightly trivial extension. ∎
Let be positive real numbers, and let be positive integers. A fusion category is said of type if is the number of the non-isomorphic simple objects of Frobenius-Perron dimension , for all .
Remark 3.2*.*
Let be a slightly trivial extension of a fusion category .
(1) Every component contains an invertible simple object . Set and , where . The proof of Proposition 3.1 shows that .
(2) The proof of Proposition 3.1 also shows that and have the same type, for all .
Corollary 3.3**.**
Let be a slightly trivial extension of a fusion category . Assume that is trivial. Then is an exact factorization of and .
Proof.
Since is trivial, the proof of Theorem 3.1 shows that every component exactly contains only one invertible simple object. Let be the invertible simple object in . Then . Hence every simple object of can be expressed in the form , where and are simple objects, by Remark 3.2. The result then follows from [3, Theorem 3.8]. ∎
Let be an extension of a fusion category . If are invertible simple objects then is also an invertible simple object. We shall write in the following corollary.
Corollary 3.4**.**
Let be a slightly trivial extension of a fusion category . Suppose that the Grothendieck ring of is commutative. Then the fusion rules of are determined by that of .
Proof.
Let . We assume the fusion rules of are determined by the following equation:
[TABLE]
Let are invertible simple objects. Then and are all nonisomorphic simple objects in and , respectively. Then
[TABLE]
∎
4. Examples of slightly trivial extensions
In this section, we shall need the following lemma.
Lemma 4.1**.**
[2, Proposition 8.20]** Let be a -extension of a fusion category . Then for all and .
For a fusion category , we shall denote by the set of Frobenius-Perron dimensions of simple objects of .
Lemma 4.2**.**
Let be a fusion category and be an extension of . Assume that contains a simple object such that . Then, for every , component has one of the following properties.
(1) contains an invertible simple object.
(2) There exists such that is a simple object, where is the smallest one in .
Proof.
Assume that part (1) does not hold true and prove (2). In this case, for every simple object in , by Lemma 2.1. Assume that . We may reorder them such that . Since , we may set . Since , we have or [math]. If then
[TABLE]
This is impossible since for all . Therefore, we have and .
Since , for all , we have or [math]. Let be the smallest number such that . Then
[TABLE]
By the minimality of , we get for all . Hence we have is simple. ∎
Let be a rank fusion category with . The fusion rules of are determined by
[TABLE]
It is not hard to check that and . It is proved in [6] that is a modular category.
Theorem 4.3**.**
Let be a fusion category with the fusion rules (4.1) and let be an extension of . Then
(1) is a slightly trivial extension of .
(2) is an exact factorization of and .
Proof.
(1) By Theorem 3.1, it suffices to prove that every component contains one invertible simple object.
Suppose on the contrary that there exists a component such that every simple object in is not invertible. Let be a simple object such that is smallest in . Then Lemma 4.2 shows that is a simple object in . That is, contains at least simple objects. By Lemma 2.1, and hence .
If then . This is impossible by Lemma 4.1. Hence only contains simple objects.
Let with . By Lemma 4.2, . By [4, Lemma 4.10], the decompositions of and can not have common summands. This implies that and hence . So we have , which is not equal to . It is also impossible by Lemma 4.1. This proves part (1).
(2) Part (2) follows from Part (1) and Corollary 3.3, since is trivial. ∎
An Ising category is a fusion category which is not pointed and has Frobenius-Perron dimension . Let be an Ising category then consists of three simple objects: 1, and , where 1 is the trivial simple object, is an invertible object and is a non-invertible object. They obey the following fusion rules:
[TABLE]
It is easy to check that , and is self-dual. It is known that any Ising category is a modular category. See [1, Appendix B] for more details on Ising categories.
Theorem 4.4**.**
Let be an extension of an Ising category . Then is a slightly trivial extension of .
Proof.
As before, we set . By Proposition 3.1, it suffices to prove that every component contains at least one invertible object.
Suppose on the contrary that every simple object in is non-invertible. Let be a simple object in such that is smallest in . Then is simple by Lemma 4.2. By Lemma 2.1, . Hence . Since , we conclude that are exactly the only two simple objects in and . Since , the only possible decomposition of is , which coincides with . This is impossible by [4, Lemma 4.10]. This proves that every component contains at least one invertible object.
∎
Acknowledgements
The author is partially supported by the startup foundation for introducing talent of NUIST (Grant No. 2018R039) and the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11201231)
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