Data

  • Title: Asymptotics in infinite monoidal categories
  • Authors: Abel Lacabanne, Daniel Tubbenhauer and Pedro Vaz
  • Status: preprint. Last update: Thu, 9 Nov 2023 08:10:44 UTC
  • ArXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09513

Abstract

We discuss formulas for the asymptotic growth rate of the number of summands in tensor powers in certain (finite or infinite) monoidal categories. Our focus is on monoidal categories with infinitely many indecomposable objects, with our main tools being generalized Perron–Frobenius theory alongside techniques from random walks.

A few extra words

This paper is a generalization of this paper and essentially everything we do in that paper works in the setting of infinite categories as well, with one key catch: the categories need to satisfy additional conditions.
An example of such a condition is that the simple random walk on the fusion graph associated to the problem in question is positively recurrent. This, roughly speaking, means that random walks return to the starting point with probability \(1\).
Let us illustrates this in two example: the random walk on \(\mathbb{Z}\), which is positively recurrent, and the random walk on \(\mathbb{N}=\mathbb{Z}_{\geq 0}\), which is not positively recurrent. The difference becomes evident when one looks at the number of path of length \(n\) starting at the origin, and ending at vertex \(v\). For \(n=200\), plotting this in \(x,y\)-coordinates \((\text{end vertex},\text{number of paths})\) gives:

Note that for \(\mathbb{N}\) the peak of the binomial distribution is roughly at \(\sqrt{200}\approx 14.1\). In fact, the endpoints of paths in this case move to infinity, while they stay at the origin for \(\mathbb{Z}\).