The Grothendieck construction in the context of tangent categories

Abstract

The Grothendieck construction establishes an equivalence between fibrations, a.k.a. fibred categories, and indexed categories, and is one of the fundamental results of category theory. Cockett and Cruttwell introduced the notion of fibrations into the context of tangent categories and proved that the fibres of a tangent fibration inherit a tangent structure from the total tangent category. The main goal of this paper is to provide a Grothendieck construction for tangent fibrations. Our first attempt will focus on providing a correspondence between tangent fibrations and indexed tangent categories, which are collections of tangent categories and tangent morphisms indexed by the objects and morphisms of a base tangent category. We will show that this construction inverts Cockett and Cruttwell's result but it does not provide a full equivalence between these two concepts. In order to understand how to define a genuine Grothendieck equivalence in the context of tangent categories, inspired by Street's formal approach to monad theory we introduce a new concept: tangent objects. We show that tangent fibrations arise as tangent objects of a suitable $2$-category and we employ this characterization to lift the Grothendieck construction between fibrations and indexed categories to a genuine Grothendieck equivalence between tangent fibrations and tangent indexed categories.