Homotopy types of topological stacks of categories

TL;DR

This paper generalizes Quillen's Theorem A to categories internal to topological spaces, enabling the assignment of homotopy types to topological stacks of categories and extending previous results on homotopy types of topological stacks.

Contribution

It extends Quillen's Theorem A to a broad class of topological categories, allowing for a functorial homotopy type assignment to topological stacks of categories.

Findings

A fully faithful and essentially surjective functor induces a homotopy equivalence of classifying spaces.

The work generalizes previous results on homotopy types of topological stacks of groupoids.

A 2-functorial homotopy type can be associated to a wide class of topological stacks.

Abstract

This note extends Quillen's Theorem A to a large class of categories internal to topological spaces. This allows us to show that under a mild condition a fully faithful and essentially surjective functor between such topological categories induces a homotopy equivalence of classifying spaces. It follows from this that we can associate a 2-functorial homotopy type to a wide class of topological stacks of categories, taking values in the 2-category of spaces, continuous maps and homotopy classes of homotopies of maps. This generalises work of Noohi and Ebert on the homotopy types of topological stacks of groupoids under the restriction to the site with numerable open covers.