A normal form for the Thin Flat Surfaces category

Abstract

The category TFS of thin flat surfaces, introduced by Khovanov, Qi, and Rozansky, is a strict symmetric monoidal category whose morphisms are compact oriented surfaces with corners arising as neighbourhoods of immersed graphs in a strip. We prove two main results. First, a normal form theorem: every connected viewable tf-cobordism is equal, in TFS, to a canonical composite determined by its topological type. Second, a sufficiency theorem: we establish a list of relations in the TFS category which are sufficient, meaning that any two composites of generators representing the same tf-cobordism are related by a finite sequence of the listed relations. Together, these results give a complete generators-and-relations presentation of TFS.