Identity in the presence of adjunction

Abstract

We develop a theory of adjunctions in semigroup categories, i.e. monoidal categories without a unit object. We show that a rigid semigroup category is promonoidal, and thus one can naturally adjoin a unit object to it. This extends the previous results of Houston in the symmetric case, and addresses a question of his. It also extends the results in the non-symmetric case with additional finiteness assumptions, obtained by Benson-Etingof-Ostrik, Coulembier and Ko-Mazorchuk-Zhang. We give an interpretation of these results using comonad cohomology, and, in the absence of finiteness conditions, using enriched traces of monoidal categories. As an application of our results, we give a characterization of finite tensor categories in terms of the finitary 2-representation theory of Mazorchuk-Miemietz.