Double Groupoids and the Symplectic Category

Abstract

We introduce the notion of a symplectic hopfoid, which is a "groupoid-like" object in the category of symplectic manifolds where morphisms are given by canonical relations. Such groupoid-like objects arise when applying a version of the cotangent functor to the structure maps of a Lie groupoid. We show that such objects are in one-to-one correspondence with symplectic double groupoids, generalizing a result of Zakrzewski concerning symplectic double groups and Hopf algebra objects in the aforementioned category. The proof relies on the fact that one can realize the core of a symplectic double groupoid as a symplectic quotient of the total space. The resulting constructions apply more generally to give a correspondence between double Lie groupoids and groupoid-like objects in the category of smooth manifolds and smooth relations, and we show that the cotangent functor relates the two constructions.