Crystals and coboundary categories

Abstract

Following an idea of A. Berenstein, we define a commutor for the category of crystals of a finite dimensional complex reductive Lie algebra. We show that this endows the category of crystals with the structure of a coboundary category. Similar to the case of braided categories, there is a group naturally acting on multiple tensor products in coboundary categories. We call this group the cactus group and identify it as the fundamental group of the moduli space of marked real genus zero stable curves.