Reducing and Classifying Fiber Bundles over Small Categories

Abstract

A fiber bundle over a small category is a locally constant family of categories whose transition functors encode how a fixed fiber is transported over the base. Its Grothendieck construction assembles this data into a category over the base, while its global behavior is governed by monodromy. For finite acyclic categories, relative beat objects provide reductions of the total category over the fixed base, leading to relative cores that exist and are unique up to isomorphism. Monodromy classifies categorical fiber bundles by non-abelian cohomology and describes their strict gauge groups and sections. We also prove a fundamental-groupoid version of Quillen's Theorem~A, which gives reductions of the base that are more general than beat reductions and preserve the classification of bundles with fixed fiber. The results are illustrated by explicit finite examples.

29 pages, comments are welcome