Categories enriched over oplax monoidal categories

TL;DR

This paper extends the concept of enriched categories to oplax monoidal categories, providing a framework that simplifies the definition of enriched functors and natural transformations, and explores applications in operads and bimodule categories.

Contribution

It introduces a new notion of categories enriched over oplax monoidal categories, generalizing existing theories and connecting to modules, operads, and bimodule categories.

Findings

Enriched categories over oplax monoidal categories are defined using only lower arity maps.

The 2-category of such enriched categories corresponds to modules over the base category.

When combined with lax monoidal structures, the enriched categories inherit a lax 2-monoidal structure.

Abstract

We define a notion of category enriched over an oplax monoidal category $V$, extending the usual definition of category enriched over a monoidal category. Even though oplax monoidal structures involve infinitely many functors $V^n\to V$, defining categories enriched over $V$ only requires the lower arity maps $(n \leq 3)$, similarly to the monoidal case. The focal point of the enrichment theory shifts, in the oplax case, from the notion of $V$-category (given by collections of objects and hom-objects together with composition and unit maps) to the one of categories enriched over $V$ (genuine categories equipped with additional structures). One of the merits of the notion of categories enriched over $V$ is that it becomes straightforward to define enriched functors and natural transformations. We show moreover that the resulting 2-category $\mathsf{Cat}_V$ can be put in correspondence (via the theory of distributors) with the 2-category of modules over $V$. We give an example of such an enriched category in the framework of operads: every cocomplete symmetric monoidal category $C$ is enriched over the category of sequences in $C$ endowed with an oplax monoidal structure stemming from the usual operadic composition product, whose monoids are still the operads. As an application of the study of the 2-functor $V\mapsto\mathsf{Cat}_V$, we show that when $V$ is also endowed with a compatible lax monoidal structure - thus forming a lax-oplax duoidal category - the 2-category $\mathsf{Cat}_V$ inherits a lax 2-monoidal structure, thereby generalising the corresponding result when the enrichment base is a braided monoidal category. We illustrate this result by discussing the lax-oplax structure on the category of $(R^\mathrm{e}, R^\mathrm{e})$-bimodules, whose bimonoids are the bialgebroids. We also comment on the relations with other enrichment theories (monoidal, multicategories, skew and lax).