Regular patterns, substitudes, Feynman categories and operads

We show that the regular patterns of Getzler (2009) form a 2-category biequivalent to the 2-category of substitudes of Day and Street (2003), and that the Feynman categories of Kaufmann and Ward (2013) form a 2-category biequivalent to the 2-category of coloured operads (with invertible 2-cells). These biequivalences induce equivalences between the corresponding categories of algebras. There are three main ingredients in establishing these biequivalences. The first is a strictification theorem (exploiting Power's General Coherence Result) which allows to reduce to the case where the structure maps are identity-on-objects functors and strict monoidal. Second, we subsume the Getzler and Kaufmann-Ward hereditary axioms into the notion of Guitart exactness, a general condition ensuring compatibility between certain left Kan extensions and a given monad, in this case the free-symmetric-monoidal-category monad. Finally we set up a biadjunction between substitudes and what we call pinned symmetric monoidal categories, from which the results follow as a consequence of the fact that the hereditary map is precisely the counit of this biadjunction

Open-closed TQFTs extend Khovanov homology from links to tangles

We use a special kind of 2-dimensional extended Topological Quantum Field Theories (TQFTs), so-called open-closed TQFTs, in order to extend Khovanov homology from links to arbitrary tangles, not necessarily even. For every plane diagram of an oriented tangle, we construct a chain complex whose homology is invariant under Reidemeister moves. The terms of this chain complex are modules of a suitable algebra A such that there is one action of A or A^op for every boundary point of the tangle. We give examples of such algebras A for which our tangle homology theory reduces to the link homology theories of Khovanov, Lee, and Bar-Natan if it is evaluated for links. As a consequence of the Cardy condition, Khovanov's graded theory can only be extended to tangles if the underlying field has finite characteristic. In all cases in which the algebra A is strongly separable, i.e. for Bar-Natan's theory in any characteristic and for Lee's theory in characteristic other than 2, we also provide the required algebraic operation for the composition of oriented tangles. Just as Khovanov's theory for links can be recovered from Lee's or Bar-Natan's by a suitable spectral sequence, we provide a spectral sequence in order to compute our tangle extension of Khovanov's theory from that of Bar-Natan's or Lee's theory. Thus, we provide a tangle homology theory that is locally computable and still strong enough to recover characteristic p Khovanov homology for links.Comment: 56 pages, LaTeX2e with xypic and pstricks macro

Matrix geometries and fuzzy spaces as finite spectral triples

A class of real spectral triples that are similar in structure to a Riemannian manifold but have a finite-dimensional Hilbert space is defined and investigated, determining a general form for the Dirac operator. Examples include fuzzy spaces defined as real spectral triples. Fuzzy 2-spheres are investigated in detail, and it is shown that the fuzzy analogues correspond to two spinor fields on the commutative sphere. In some cases it is necessary to add a mass mixing matrix to the commutative Dirac operator to get a precise agreement for the eigenvalues.Comment: 39 pages, final versio