Saturday, 7 February 2009

gr.group theory - A functor that comes from a morphism in a bigger category

My loose question is like this: what would you say about an equivalence of categories where both are concrete categories, and the equivalence functor is induced from a set-theoretic bijection at the level of objects? It should be something like "equivalence of categories induced by a natural isomorphism over the category of Set" but I am not sure if that makes sense. Since this is not very clear, I will give the motivating example.



There is a construction involving finite p-groups and I'm looking for the right category-theoretic language that would describe the properties of this construction. The full construction is called the Lazard correspondence, but since the Lazard correspondence is hard to describe, I'll stick with a simple case: the Baer correspondence (I briefly describe it below, see here for more).



Let p be an odd prime. The Baer correspondence gives an equivalence between two categories:



p-groups of nilpotency class at most two $leftrightarrow$ Lie rings whose order is a power of p and nilpotency class is at most two



Here, a Lie ring is an abelian group with alternating biadditive Lie bracket satisfying the Jacobi condition. It can be thought of as a Lie algebra over the ring of integers.



The Baer correspondence is more than just an equivalence of categories, and even more than an isomorphism of categories, because it includes the following even more specific information: for a p-group of nilpotency class at most two, it actually constructs a p-Lie ring with the same underlying set, and hence it gives a set-theoretic bijection between each p-group and the corresponding p-Lie ring. For instance, in the direction from Lie ring to group, the group corresponding to a Lie ring L has the same underlying set and group operation:



$$xy := x + y + frac{1}{2}[x,y]$$



There's a similar formula for going from group to Lie ring.



Moreover, the functor between the categories is the same as the one induced by completing the square in this bijection. For instance, if $f:L_1 to L_2$ is a Lie ring homomorphism, and if $a_1:L_1 to G_1$ and $a_2:L_2 to G_2$ are the set bijections to their respective corresponding groups, then the functorially induced homomorphism from $G_1$ to $G_2$ is $a_2 circ f circ a_1^{-1}$ as a set map.

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