Representations of Internal Categories

Abstract

Abstract. Adams gave the notion of a Hopf algebroid generalizing the notion of a Hopf algebra and showed that certain generalized homology theories take values in the category of comodules over the Hopf algebroid associated with each homology theory. A Hopf algebra represents an affine group scheme which is a group in the category of a scheme and the notion of comodules over a Hopf algebra is equivalent to the notion of representations of the affine group scheme represented by a Hopf algebra. On the other hand, a Hopf algebroid represents a groupoid in the category of schemes. Therefore, it is natural to consider the notion of comodules over a Hopf algebroid as representations of the groupoid represented by a Hopf algebroid. This motivates the study of representations of groupoids, and more generally categories, for topologists. The aim of this paper is to set a categorical foundation of representations of an internal category which is a category object in a given category, using the notion of a fibered category. IntroductionIn [1], Adams generalized the notion of Hopf algebras in the study of generalized homology theories satisfying certain conditions and showed that such a generalized homology theory, say E * , takes values in the category of comodules over the 'generalized Hopf algebra' associated with E * . The notion introduced by Adams is now called a Hopf algebroid which represents a functor taking values in the category of groupoids. Here 'a groupoid' means a special category whose morphisms are all isomorphisms. A comodule over a Hopf algebroid can be regarded as a representation of the groupoid represented by . The aim of this paper is to set a categorical foundation of representations of an internal category which is a category object in a given category.We begin by reviewing the notion of a fibered category following [7] and an internal category in Section 1, we give a detailed description on the relationship between the notions of a fibered category and a 2-category in Section 2, which is originally observed in [7, Section 8]. There, we show that the 2-category of a fibered category over a given category E is equivalent to the 2-category of 'lax functors' from the opposite category of E to the 2-category of categories. Our construction of fibered categories from lax functors allows us to give the notion of fibered categories represented by internal categories (Example 2.18) and a short definition (Example 2.19) of Grothendieck topoi over a simplicial object in the given site.