Saturday, 4 July 2009

Is a bialgebra pairing of Hopf algebras automatically a Hopf pairing?

The following question came up in the course on Quantum Groups here at UC Berkeley. (If you care, I have been TeXing uneditted lecture notes.)



Let X,Y be (infinite-dimensional) Hopf algebras over a ground field mathbbF. A linear map langle,rangle:XotimesYtomathbbF is a bialgebra pairing if langlex,y1y2rangle=langleDeltax,y1otimesy2rangle and langlex1x2,yrangle=langlex1otimesx2,Deltayrangle for all x,x1,x2inX and y,y1,y2inY. (You must pick a convention of how to define the pairing langle,rangle:Xotimes2otimesYotimes2tomathbbF.) And we also demand that langle1,rangle=epsilonY and langle,1rangle=epsilonX, but this might follow from the previous conditions. (See edit.)



A bialgebra pairing is Hopf if it also respects the antipode: langleS(x),yrangle=langlex,S(y)rangle. A pairing langle,rangle:XotimesYtomathbbF is nondegenerate if each of the the induced maps XtoY and YtoX has trivial kernel.




Question: Is a (nondegenerate) bialgebra pairing of Hopf algebras necessarily Hopf? (Does it depend on whether the pairing is nondegenerate?)




My intuition is that regardless of the nondegeneracy, the answer is "Yes": my motivation is that a bialgebra homomorphism between Hopf algebras automatically respects the antipode. But we were unable to make this into a proof in the infinite-dimensional case.



Edit: If langle,rangle:XotimesYtomathbbF is nondegenerate, then it is true that as soon as it satisfies langlex,y1y2rangle=langleDeltax,y1otimesy2rangle and langlex1x2,yrangle=langlex1otimesx2,Deltayrangle, so that the induced maps XtoY and YtoX are (possibly non-unital) algebra homomorphisms, then it also satisfies langle1,rangle=epsilonY and langle,1rangle=epsilonX, so that the algebra homomorphism are actually unital. But I think that this does require that the pairing be nondegenerate. At least, I don't see how to prove it without the nondegeneracy assumption. So probably the nondegeneracy is required for the statement about antipodes as well.

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