Monoidal categories enriched in braided monoidal categories

Abstract

We introduce the notion of a monoidal category enriched in a braided monoidal category $\mathcal V$. We set up the basic theory, and prove a classification result in terms of braided oplax monoidal functors to the Drinfeld center of some monoidal category $\mathcal T$. Even the basic theory is interesting; it shares many characteristics with the theory of monoidal categories enriched in a symmetric monoidal category, but lacks some features. Of particular note, there is no cartesian product of braided-enriched categories, and the natural transformations do not form a 2-category, but rather satisfy a braided interchange relation. Strikingly, our classification is slightly more general than what one might have anticipated in terms of strong monoidal functors $\mathcal V \to Z(\mathcal T)$. We would like to understand this further; in a future paper we show that the functor is strong if and only if the enriched category is `complete' in a certain sense. Nevertheless it remains to understand what non-complete enriched categories may look like. One should think of our construction as a generalization of de-equivariantization, which takes a strong monoidal functor $\mathsf{Rep}(G) \to Z(\mathcal T)$ for some finite group $G$ and a monoidal category $\mathcal T$, and produces a new monoidal category $\mathcal T // G$. In our setting, given any braided oplax monoidal functor $\mathcal V \to Z(\mathcal T)$, for any braided $\mathcal V$, we produce $\mathcal T // \mathcal V$: this is not usually an `honest' monoidal category, but is instead $\mathcal V$-enriched. If $\mathcal V$ has a braided lax monoidal functor to $\mathsf{Vec}$, we can use this to reduce the enrichment to $\mathsf{Vec}$, and this recovers de-equivariantization as a special case.