Crystals and coboundary categories
Joel Kamnitzer, (UC Berkeley)
Abstract: A crystal for a representation of a semisimple Lie algebra is a
combinatorial object which encodes the structure of the representation.
There is an interesting tensor product on these crystals. We give a
construction of a commutor (natural isomophisms A x B -> B x A) for
the category of crystals of a semisimple Lie algebra. This commutor is
symmetric but does not satisfy the usual hexagon axiom. Instead it obeys a
different axiom which makes the category of crystals into a coboundary category.
Motivated by the above construction, we investigate the structure of
coboundary categories. Just as the braid group acts on repeated tensor
products in a braided category, the fundamental group of the moduli
space of stable real genus 0 curves with n marked points acts on
repeated tensor products in a coboundary category.
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