Saturday, 28 April 2012

gr.group theory - Is an invertible biset necessarily a bitorsor?

Question



Let G be a group, and let X be a G-biset that is (weakly) invertible with respect to the contracted product. Is X necessarily a bitorsor?



Background



By G-biset, I mean a set equipped with commuting left and right G-actions. There is a standard tensor product on the category of G-bisets called the contracted product; it is defined by XtimesGY=XtimesY/(xcdotg,y)sim(x,gcdoty), where G acts on the left by its left action on X, and on the right by its right action on Y. The unit object is the group G, where G acts by left and right multiplication on itself.



A left G-torsor is a left G-set X such that the map GtimesXtoXtimesX, (g,x)mapsto(gcdotx,x) is a bijection. A right G-torsor is defined analogously. A G-bitorsor is a G-biset that is both a left and a right G-torsor. A G-bitorsor X is necessarily invertible with respect to the contracted product; its inverse is the opposite G-bitorsor Xoperatornameop. This bitorsor has the same objects as X, but ginG acts on the left (resp. the right) by the right (resp. left) action of g1.



It follows from a simple counting argument that when G is a finite group, any invertible G-biset is a G-bitorsor. Is this true for arbitrary groups (and more generally, in an arbitrary topos)? What about if we replace "invertible" by "right- (or left-) invertible"?



I can show, at least in the punctual topos (and I think it's true in general), that if Xoperatornameop is an inverse to X, then X must be a G-bitorsor. So the question is whether a G-biset can have an inverse not of this form.



The reason I'm interested in this question is that I want to understand how to generalize bitorsors to higher categorical settings. A possible generalization would be an invertible profunctor, but this is only a good definition if the answer to my question is affirmative.

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