Australian Category Seminar

A factorization system inter alia pertaining to descent

Ross Street·14 August 2002

The talk revisited the last few pages of my paper

"Characterization of bicategories of stacks", Lecture Notes in Math. 962 (1982) 282-291

dealing with stacks and torsors. I will restrict myself here with describing the factorization system alluded to in the title of the talk.

Let E be a category with some distinguished morphisms called "covers" satisfying a few simple axioms (like regular epimorphisms in a regular category). Let F = Hom (Eop , Cat) be the 2-category of "categories varying over E" (that is, the objects are pseudofunctors from Eop to Cat).

A morphism j : X → Y in F is called ccff (meaning "cover cartesian and fully faithful") when its components j_U : XU → YU are all fully faithful and the squares expressing pseudonaturality, that involve a morphism of E which is a cover V → U, are pseudopullbacks.

A morphism s : A → B in F is called lso (meaning "locally surjective on objects") when, for all objects b of each BU, there exists a cover e : V → U and a in AV such that (s_V)a is isomorphic to (Be)b.

These two classes of morphism determine a factorization system on the bicategory F. Each morphism f : A → X in F factors pseudofunctorially as A → Z → X where ZU consists of those x in XU that are "locally isomorphic to an object in the image of f_U ".

In particular, for a category A in E, this factorization applied to the "yoneda embedding of A" yields the stack Tors(A) of torsors over A.

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