The necessity of (co)unit in nearly Frobenius algebra

Abstract

In this article, we concern the concept of nearly Frobenius algebra, which corresponds to most 2D-TQFT of which each cobordism admits no critical points of index 0 or 2. We prove that any nearly Frobenius algebra over a principal ideal domain with surjective multiplication and injective comultiplication is indeed a Frobenius algebra. The motivation of this study mainly emanates from the investigation of potential constructions of link homology.

23 pages, 6 figures