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Background:

The question at hand is in line with previous questions of mine, such as:

I ask because I work with Cayley graphs indirectly for my research and I'm a fan on category theory.

The Question:

What is category theory's take on the Cayley graph of a group with respect to a subset of the group?

The Details:

Definition: The Cayley graph $\Gamma(G,S)$ of a group $G$ for $S\subseteq G$ is the graph with:

  • Vertex set $G$.
  • A colour $c_s$ for each $s\in S$.
  • For every $g\in G$ and $s\in S$, there is a directed edge of colour $c_s$ from the vertex corresponding to $g$ to the one corresponding to $gs$.

Thoughts:

I found this: Can a Cayley Graph be represented as a functor from the category of groups to the category of graphs?

The usual place to find things like this is nLab, but the page on Cayley graphs does not desribe the graph using category theory.

This is not a question I can answer myself: I lack the depth of knowledge required in category theory.

Please pitch your answers at an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate level.

Shaun
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1 Answers1

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We can define a category $\mathcal{C}$ consisting of objects $(G,S)$ for a group $G$ and a subset $S\subseteq G$, and whose morphisms $(G,S)\to(H,T)$ are group homomorphisms $\varphi\colon G\to H$ such that $\varphi(S)\subseteq T$. Then the Cayley graph defines a functor $\Gamma\colon\mathcal{C}\to\mathrm{DirColGraph}, (G,S)\mapsto\Gamma(G,S)$ to the category of directed coloured graphs. Namely, given a map $\varphi\colon(G,S)\to(H,T)$ in $\mathcal{C}$, we have an associated map $\Gamma(G,S)\to\Gamma(H,T)$ that sends a vertex $g\in\Gamma(G,S)$ to the vertex $\varphi(g)\in\Gamma(H,T)$, that sends a colour $c_s$ to the colour $c_{\varphi(s)}$, and an edge $r_s(g)$ from $g$ to $gs$ of colour $c_s$ to the edge $r_{\varphi(s)}(\varphi(g))$ from $\varphi(g)$ to $\varphi(gs)=\varphi(g)\varphi(s)$ of colour $c_{\varphi(s)}$. It is clear that if $\varphi\colon(G,S)\to(G,S)$ is $\mathrm{id}_G$, then $\Gamma\varphi$ is also the identity map, and I will leave it to you to show that $\Gamma$ preserves composition of morphisms.

However, as category theorist I actually don't like directed graphs that much. Why not try to form categories? We can build a functor $\mathbb{E}\colon\mathrm{Grp}\to \mathrm{Grpd}$ towards the category of groupoids (i.e. categories in which each morphism is an isomorphism), sending a group $G$ to the groupoid $\mathbb{E}G$ whose objects are the elements of $G$, and in which a morphism $\varphi\colon g\to h$ is an element $s\in G$ such that $g\cdot s=h$. This means that, ignoring the colours, $\mathbb{E}G$ is an ''upgrade'' of $\Gamma(G,G)$ from a directed graph to a category (a groupoid, to be precise). There is another functor $\mathbb{B}\colon\mathrm{Grp}\to\mathrm{Grpd}$ that sends a group $G$ to a one-object groupoid $\mathbb{B}G$ with hom-set (singular) given by $\mathbb{B}G(\star,\star)=G$ (and composition is given by the group structure on $G$). There is a natural functor $\mathbb{E}G\to\mathbb{B}G$, which is of huge importance in algebraic topology, since it allows you to quickly construct Eilenberg-MacLane spaces and this functor is very important in the study of principal $G$-bundles.

If we want to introduce the subset $S\subseteq G$ again, we can define $\mathbb{E}(G,S)$ to be the subcategory of $\mathbb{E}G$ on all objects, in which a morphism $-\cdot h\colon g\to gh$ in $\mathbb{E}G$ lies in $\mathbb{E}(G,S)$ iff $h\in S$. This only works if $S$ is a subgroup of $G$! The reason is that our subcategory $\mathbb{E}(G,S)$ must be closed under composition. Note that the analogously defined groupoid $\mathbb{B}(G,S)$ will just be $\mathbb{B}S$, again under the assumption that $S$ is a subgroup of $G$.

If $S$ is a subgroup of $G$ and we want to have the colours again, we can work with the notion of a coloured category, in which each morphism has a certain colour. We simply colour the morphism $-\cdot s\colon g\to gs$ with the colour $c_s$, and obtain a functor $\mathbb{E}\colon\mathrm{Grp}^{(2)}\to\mathrm{ColGrpd}$, where $\mathrm{Grp}^{(2)}$ is the category of pairs $(G,S)$ of a group $G$ and a subgroup $S$ of $G$ (and whose morphisms are group homomorphisms preserving these subgroups), and $\mathrm{ColGrpd}$ is the category of coloured groupoids (and a morphism is a map of sets between the colours and a functor between the groupoids that acts accordingly on the colours).

Daniël Apol
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