ON ALGEBRAIC STRUCTURES IMPLICIT IN TOPOLOGICAL QUANTUM FIELD THEORIES

Abstract

We show that any 3D topological quantum field theory satisfying physically reasonable factorizability conditions has associated to it in a natural way a Hopf algebra object in a suitable tensor category. We also show that all objects in the tensor category have the structure of left-left crossed bimodules over the Hopf algebra object. For 4D factorizable topological quantum filed theories, we provide by analogous methods a construction of a Hopf algebra category.