On Bialgebras, Comodules, Descent Data and Thom Spectra in $\infty$-categories

Abstract

This paper lays some of the foundations for working with not-necessarily-commutative bialgebras and their categories of comodules in $\infty$-categories. We prove that the categories of comodules and modules over a bialgebra always admit suitably structured monoidal structures in which the tensor product is taken in the ambient category (as opposed to a relative (co)tensor product over the underlying algebra or coalgebra of the bialgebra). We give two examples of higher coalgebraic structure: first, following Hess we show that for a map of $\mathbb{E}_n$-ring spectra $\phi\colon A\to B$, the associated $\infty$-category of descent data is equivalent to the category of comodules over $B\otimes_A B$, the so-called descent coring; secondly, we show that Thom spectra are canonically equipped with a highly structured comodule structure which is equivalent to the $\infty$-categorical Thom diagonal of Ando, Blumberg, Gepner, Hopkins and Rezk (which we describe explicitly) and that this highly structured diagonal decomposes the Thom isomorphism for an oriented Thom spectrum in the expected way.