Skew-closed categories

Spurred by the new examples found by Kornel Szlach\'anyi of a form of lax monoidal category, the author felt the time ripe to publish a reworking of Eilenberg-Kelly's original paper on closed categories appropriate to the laxer context. The new examples are connected with bialgebroids. With Stephen Lack, we have also used the concept to give an alternative definition of quantum category and quantum groupoid. Szlach\'anyi has called the lax notion {\em skew monoidal}. This paper defines {\em skew closed category}, proves Yoneda lemmas for categories enriched over such, and looks at closed cocompletion.Comment: Version 2 corrects a mistake in axiom (2.4) noticed by Ignacio Lopez Franco. Only the corrected axiom was used later in the paper so no other consequential change was needed. A few obvious typos have been corrected. Some material on weighted colimits, composite modules and skew-promonoidal categories has been added. Version 3 adds Example 23 and corrects a few typos.

Serre functors and graded categories

We study Serre structures on categories enriched in pivotal monoidal categories, and apply this to study Serre structures on two types of graded k-linear categories: categories with group actions and categories with graded hom spaces. We check that Serre structures are preserved by taking orbit categories and skew group categories, and describe the relationship with graded Frobenius algebras. Using a formal version of Auslander-Reiten translations, we show that the derived category of a d-representation finite algebra is fractionally Calabi-Yau if and only if its preprojective algebra has a graded Nakayama automorphism of finite order. This connects various results in the literature and gives new examples of fractional Calabi-Yau algebras.Comment: 70 pages; v4 is post referee repor

Configuration spaces of products

We show that the configuration spaces of a product of parallelizable manifolds may be recovered from those of the factors as the Boardman-Vogt tensor product of right modules over the operads of little cubes of the appropriate dimension. We also discuss an analogue of this result for manifolds that are not necessarily parallelizable, which involves a new operad of skew little cubes.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figure. To appear in Transactions of the AMS. May vary slightly from published versio