Compactification of *-autonomous categories

Abstract

We study the question when a *-autonomous (Mix-)category has a representation as a $*$-autonomous category of a compact one. We prove that necessary and sufficient condition is that weak distributivity maps are monic (or, equivalently epic). For a Mix-category, this condition is, in turn, equivalent to the requirement that Mix-maps be monic (or epic). We call categories satisfying this property torsion-free. An important side result is that torsion-free categories have canonical partial traces.