The center functor is fully faithful

Abstract

We prove that the notion of Drinfeld center defines a functor from the category of indecomposable multi-tensor categories with morphisms given by bimodules to that of braided tensor categories with morphisms given by monoidal bimodules. Moreover, we apply some ideas from the physics of topological orders to prove that the center functor restricted to indecomposable multi-fusion categories (with additional conditions on the target category) is fully faithful. As byproducts, we provide new proofs to some important known results in fusion categories. In physics, this fully faithful functor gives the precise mathematical description of the boundary-bulk relation for 2+1D anomaly-free topological orders with gapped boundaries.