© 1998 by London Mathematical Society
© The London Mathematical Society
S-Structures for k-Linear Categories and the Definition of a Modular Functor
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford 2429 St Giles Street, Oxford OX1 3LB. E-mail: tillmann{at}maths.ox.ac.uk
Received 15 August 1995. Revision received 15 March 1996.
Ideas from string theory and quantum field theory have been the motivation for new invariants of knots and 3-dimensional manifolds which have been constructed from complex algebraic structures such as Hopf algebras [17, 22], monoidal categories with additional structure [24], and modular functors [14, 23]. These constructions are closely related. Here we take a unifying categorical approach based on a natural 2-dimensional generalisation of a topological field theory in the sense of Atiyah [1], and show that the axioms defining these complex algebraic structures are a consequence of the underlying geometry of surfaces.