Thin fillers in the cubical nerves of omega-categories

It is shown that the cubical nerve of a strict omega-category is a sequence of sets with cubical face operations and distinguished subclasses of thin elements satisfying certain thin filler conditions. It is also shown that a sequence of this type is the cubical nerve of a strict omega-category unique up to isomorphism; the cubical nerve functor is therefore an equivalence of categories. The sequences of sets involved are in effect the analogues of cubical T-complexes appropriate for strict omega-categories. Degeneracies are not required in the definition of these sequences, but can in fact be constructed as thin fillers. The proof of the thin filler conditions uses chain complexes and chain homotopies.Comment: Revised version to appear in Theory and Applications of Categories; changed terminology; additional figures, examples and references; 27 page

Omega-categories and chain complexes

There are several ways to construct omega-categories from combinatorial objects such as pasting schemes or parity complexes. We make these constructions into a functor on a category of chain complexes with additional structure, which we call augmented directed complexes. This functor from augmented directed complexes to omega-categories has a left adjoint, and the adjunction restricts to an equivalence on a category of augmented directed complexes with good bases. The omega-categories equivalent to augmented directed complexes with good bases include the omega-categories associated to globes, simplexes and cubes; thus the morphisms between these omega-categories are determined by morphisms between chain complexes. It follows that the entire theory of omega-categories can be expressed in terms of chain complexes; in particular we describe the biclosed monoidal structure on omega-categories and calculate some internal homomorphism objects.Comment: 18 pages; as published, with minor changes from version

Simple omega-categories and chain complexes

The category of strict omega-categories has an important full subcategory whose objects are the simple omega-categories freely generated by planar trees or by globular cardinals. We give a simple description of this subcategory in terms of chain complexes, and we give a similar description of the opposite category, the category of finite discs, in terms of cochain complexes. Berger has shown that the category of simple omega-categories has a filtration by iterated wreath products of the simplex category. We generalise his result by considering wreath products of categories of chain complexes over the simplex category.Comment: 14 pages; v2 has minor corrections and a little additional materia

Harmonic equiangular tight frames comprised of regular simplices

An equiangular tight frame (ETF) is a sequence of unit-norm vectors in a Euclidean space whose coherence achieves equality in the Welch bound, and thus yields an optimal packing in a projective space. A regular simplex is a simple type of ETF in which the number of vectors is one more than the dimension of the underlying space. More sophisticated examples include harmonic ETFs which equate to difference sets in finite abelian groups. Recently, it was shown that some harmonic ETFs are comprised of regular simplices. In this paper, we continue the investigation into these special harmonic ETFs. We begin by characterizing when the subspaces that are spanned by the ETF's regular simplices form an equi-isoclinic tight fusion frame (EITFF), which is a type of optimal packing in a Grassmannian space. We shall see that every difference set that produces an EITFF in this way also yields a complex circulant conference matrix. Next, we consider a subclass of these difference sets that can be factored in terms of a smaller difference set and a relative difference set. It turns out that these relative difference sets lend themselves to a second, related and yet distinct, construction of complex circulant conference matrices. Finally, we provide explicit infinite families of ETFs to which this theory applies