Contents

category theory

# Contents

## Definition

A bifibration of categories is a functor

$E \to B$

that is both a Grothendieck fibration as well as an opfibration.

Therefore every morphism $f : b_1 \to b_2$ in a bifibration has both a push-forward $f_* : E_{b_1} \to E_{b_2}$ as well as a pullback $f^* : E_{b_2} \to E_{b_1}$.

## Examples

Ordinary Grothendieck fibrations correspond to pseudofunctors to Cat, by the Grothendieck construction and hence to prestacks. For these one may consider descent.

If the fibration is even a bifibration, there is a particularly elegant algebraic way to encode its descent properties; this is monadic descent. The Benabou–Roubaud theorem characterizes descent properties for bifibrations.

## Relation to distributive laws

Fibrations and opfibrations on a category $C$ (or more generally an object of a suitable 2-category) are the algebras for a pair of pseudomonads. If $C$ has pullbacks, there is a pseudo-distributive law between these pseudomonads, whose joint algebras are the bifibrations satisfying the Beck-Chevalley condition; see (von Glehn).

## Bifibration of model categories

In (CagneMelliès) the authors develop a notion of Quillen bifibration which combines the two concepts of Grothendieck bifibration and Quillen model structure, establishing conditions for when in a bifibration model structures on all the fibers and on the base combine to give one on the total category.

## Bifibration of bicategories

The basic theory of 2-fibrations, fibrations of bicategories, is developed in (Buckley). One (unpublished) proposal by Buckley and Shulman, for a “2-bifibration”, a bifibration of bicategories, is a functor of bicategories that is both a 2-fibration and a 2-opfibration. This should correspond to a pseudofunctor into $2 Cat_{adj}$, just as for 1-categories. There is a difference from this case, however, in that although a 2-fibration (corresponding to a “doubly contravariant” pseudofunctor $B^{coop} \to 2Cat$) has both cartesian lifts of 2-cells and 1-cells, a 2-opfibration (corresponding to a totally covariant pseudofunctor $B\to 2Cat$) has opcartesian lifts of 1-cells but still cartesian lifts of 2-cells.

## References

Last revised on June 27, 2018 at 09:51:37. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.