The formal theory of Tannaka duality

Abstract

A Tannakian category is an abelian tensor category equipped with a fiber functor and additional structures which ensure that it is equivalent to the category of representations of some affine groupoid scheme acting on the spectrum of a field extension. If we are working over an arbitrary commutative ring rather than a field, the categories of representations cease to be abelian. We provide a list of sufficient conditions which ensure that an additive tensor category is equivalent to the category of representations of an affine groupoid scheme acting on an affine scheme, or, more generally, to the category of representations of a Hopf algebroid in a symmetric monoidal category. In order to do this we develop a "formal theory of Tannaka duality" inspired by Ross Street's "formal theory of monads." We apply our results to certain categories of filtered modules which are used to study p-adic Galois representations.