Double Groupoids, Orbifolds, and the Symplectic Category

Abstract

Motivated by an attempt to better understand the notion of a symplectic stack, we introduce the notion of a symplectic hopfoid, which should be thought of as the analog of a groupoid in the so-called symplectic category. After reviewing some foundational material on canonical relations and this category, we show that symplectic hopfoids provide a characterization of symplectic double groupoids in these terms. Then, we show how such structures may be used to produce examples of symplectic orbifolds, and conjecture that all symplectic orbifolds arise via a similar construction. The symplectic structures on the orbifolds produced arise naturally from the use of canonical relations. The characterization of symplectic double groupoids mentioned above is made possible by an observation which provides various ways of realizing the core of a symplectic double groupoid as a symplectic quotient of the total space, and includes as a special case a result of Zakrzewski concerning Hopf algebra objects in the symplectic category. This point of view also leads to a new proof that the core of a symplectic double groupoid itself inherits the structure of a symplectic groupoid. Similar constructions work more generally for any double Lie groupoid---producing what we call a Lie hopfoid---and we describe the sense in which a version of the "cotangent functor" relates such hopfoid structures.