A duality formalism in the spirit of Grothendieck and Verdier

Abstract

We study monoidal categories that enjoy a certain weakening of the rigidity property, namely, the existence of a dualizing object in the sense of Grothendieck and Verdier. We call them Grothendieck-Verdier categories. Notable examples include the derived category of constructible sheaves on a scheme (with respect to tensor product) as well as the derived and equivariant derived categories of constructible sheaves on an algebraic group (with respect to convolution). We show that the notions of pivotal category and ribbon category, which are well known in the setting of rigid monoidal categories, as well as certain standard results associated with these notions, have natural analogues in the world of Grothendieck-Verdier categories.