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This paper explores the relationship amongst the various simplicial and pseudo-simplicial objects characteristically associated to any bicategory C. It proves the fact that the geometric realizations of all of these possible candidate `nerves of C' are homotopy equivalent. Any one of these realizations could therefore be taken as the classifying space BC of the bicategory. Its other major result proves a direct extension of Thomason's `Homotopy Colimit Theorem' to bicategories: When the homotopy colimit construction is carried out on a diagram of spaces obtained by applying the classifying space functor to a diagram of bicategories, the resulting space has the homotopy type of a certain bicategory, called the `Grothendieck construction on the diagram'. Our results provide coherence for all reasonable extensions to bicategories of Quillen's definition of the `classifying space' of a category as the geometric realization of the category's Grothendieck nerve, and they are applied to monoidal (tensor) categories through the elemental `delooping' construction.Comment: 42 page

This work contributes to clarifying several relationships between certain higher categorical structures and the homotopy type of their classifying spaces. Bicategories (in particular monoidal categories) have well understood simple geometric realizations, and we here deal with homotopy types represented by lax diagrams of bicategories, that is, lax functors to the tricategory of bicategories. In this paper, it is proven that, when a certain bicategorical Grothendieck construction is performed on a lax diagram of bicategories, then the classifying space of the resulting bicategory can be thought of as the homotopy colimit of the classifying spaces of the bicategories that arise from the initial input data given by the lax diagram. This result is applied to produce bicategories whose classifying space has a double loop space with the same homotopy type, up to group completion, as the underlying category of any given (non-necessarily strict) braided monoidal category. Specifically, it is proven that these double delooping spaces, for categories enriched with a braided monoidal structure, can be explicitly realized by means of certain genuine simplicial sets characteristically associated to any braided monoidal categories, which we refer to as their (Street's) geometric nerves.Mathematical Subject Classification: 18D05, 18D10, 55P15, 55P48.

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