Enriched coalgebras are sometimes comonadic
Abstract
We introduce an enriched notion of a coalgebra over an operad P in a symmetric monoidal V-category C. When C is semicartesian and P is unital, we construct a V-endofunctor on C associated to P and give conditions under which it is a V-comonad with co-Eilenberg-Moore V-category isomorphic to the V-category of P-coalgebras in C. In many cases, this permits computation of V-categories of coalgebras. The key example is the category of pointed topological spaces with wedge product, enriched over topological spaces with Cartesian product, where this construction recovers the comonadic description of C_n-coalgebras of Moreno-Fern\'andez, Wierstra and the present author. We further recover one direction of Fox's theorem.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.09354,
title = {Enriched coalgebras are sometimes comonadic},
author = {Oisín Flynn-Connolly},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.09354},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
37 pages; added condition for explicitly computing comonad; standardised notation in style of Kelly; added more comparison with existing work in TCS and AT