Non-unital polygraphs form a presheaf category

Abstract

We prove, as claimed by A.Carboni and P.T.Johnstone, that the category of non-unital polygraphs, i.e. polygraphs where the source and target of each generator are not identity arrows, is a presheaf category. More generally we develop a new criterion for proving that certain classes of polygraphs are presheaf categories. This criterion also applies to the larger class of polygraphs where only the source of each generator is not an identity, and to the class of "many-to-one polygraphs", producing a new, more direct, proof that this is a presheaf category. The criterion itself seems to be extendable to more general type of operads over possibly different combinatorics, but we leave this question for future work. In an appendix we explain why this result is relevant if one wants to fix the arguments of a famous paper of M.Kapranov and V.Voevodsky and make them into a proof of C.Simpson's semi-strictification conjecture. We present a program aiming at proving this conjecture, which will be continued in subsequent papers.