English

A Horizontal Categorification of Gelfand Duality

Operator Algebras 2011-12-30 v2 Category Theory

Abstract

In the setting of C*-categories, we provide a definition of "spectrum" of a commutative full C*-category as a one-dimensional unital saturated Fell bundle over a suitable groupoid (equivalence relation) and prove a categorical Gelfand duality theorem generalizing the usual Gelfand duality between the categories of commutative unital C*-algebras and compact Hausdorff spaces. Although many of the individual ingredients that appear along the way are well-known, the somehow unconventional way we "glue" them together seems to shed some new light on the subject.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0812.3601,
  title  = {A Horizontal Categorification of Gelfand Duality},
  author = {Paolo Bertozzini and Roberto Conti and Wicharn Lewkeeratiyutkul},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.3601},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

22 pages, AMS-LaTeX2e, results unchanged, several improvements in the exposition, one section added, to appear in Advances in Mathematics

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:53:43.828Z