Recently, distributive laws have been used by Böhm and Stefan to construct new examples of duplicial (paracyclic) objects, and hence cyclic homology theories. The paradigmatic example of such a theory is the cyclic homology HC(A) of an associative algebra A. It was observed by Kustermans, Murphy, and Tuset that the functor HC can be twisted by automorphisms of A. It turns out that this twisting procedure can be applied to any duplicial object defined by a distributive law.
I will begin by defining duplicial objects and cyclic homology, as well as discussing some categorical concepts, then describe the construction of Böhm and Stefan. I will then define the category of factorisations of a distributive law and explain how this acts on their construction, and give some examples, making explicit how the action of this category generalises the twisting of an associative algebra.