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The cyclic and modular microcosm principle in quantum topology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2025
Abstract
Monoidal categories with additional structure such as a braiding or some form of dualityabound in quantum topology. They often appear in tandem with Frobenius algebras inside them. Motivations for this range from the theory of module categories to the construction of correlators in conformal field theory. We gen eralize the Baez–Dolan microcosm principle to consistently describe all these types of algebras by extending it to cyclic and modular algebras in the sense of Getzler–Kapranov. Our main result links the microcosm principle for cyclic algebras to the one for modular algebras via Costello’s modular envelope. The result can be understood as a local-to-global construction or an integration procedure for various flavors of Frobenius algebras that substantially generalizes and unifies the available (and often intrinsically semisimple) methods using for example triangulations or classical skein theory. As the main application of this rather abstract result, we solve the problem of classifying consistent systems of correlators for open conformal field theories and show that the genus zero correlators for logarithmic conformal field theories constructed by Fuchs–Schweigert can be uniquely extended to handlebodies. This establishes a very general correspondence between full genus zero conformal field theory in dimension two and skein theory in dimension three.
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Footnotes
L.W. gratefully acknowledges support by the ANR project CPJ n°ANR-22-CPJ1-0001-01 at the Institut de Mathématiques de Bourgogne (IMB). The IMB receives support from the EIPHI Graduate School (contract ANR-17-EURE-0002).
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