A comonad for Grothendieck fibrations

Abstract

We prove that cloven Grothendieck fibrations over a fixed base $\ct{B}$ are the pseudo-coalgebras for a lax idempotent 2-comonad on $\ct{Cat}/\ct{B}$. We show this via an original observation that the known colax idempotent 2-monad for fibrations over a fixed base has a right 2-adjoint. As an important consequence, we obtain an original cofree construction of a fibration on a functor. We also give a new, conceptual proof of the fact that the forgetful 2-functor from split fibrations to cloven fibrations over a fixed base has both a left 2-adjoint and a right 2-adjoint, in terms of coherence phenomena of strictification of pseudo-(co)algebras. The 2-monad for fibrations yields the left splitting and the 2-comonad yields the right splitting. Moreover, we show that the constructions induced by these coherence theorems recover Giraud's explicit constructions of the left and the right splittings.

Improved version, accepted for publication in Theory and Applications of Categories (Bunge Festschrift)