Fiber functors and reconstruction of Hopf algebras

Abstract

The main objective of the present paper is to present a version of the Tannaka–Krein type reconstruction theorems: if $F:{\mathcal B}\to {\mathcal C}$ is an exact faithful monoidal functor of tensor categories, one would like to realize ${\mathcal B}$ as category of representations of a braided Hopf algebra $H(F)$ in ${\mathcal C}$. We prove that this is the case iff ${\mathcal B}$ has the additional structure of a monoidal ${\mathcal C}$-module category compatible with F, which equivalently means that F admits a monoidal section. For Hopf algebras, this reduces to a version of the Radford projection theorem. The Hopf algebra is constructed through the relative coend for module categories. We expect this basic result to have a wide range of applications, in particular in the absence of fiber functors, and we give some applications. One particular motivation was the logarithmic Kazhdan–Lusztig conjecture.