PROPs associated to Lawvere theories and their relation to polynomial functors

Abstract

Several adjunctions between functor categories have been studied and applied previously. These include Powell's adjunction between functor categories on free groups and on the linear PROP associated with the Lie operad, as well as those implicit in the equivalence of Pirashvili between functors on projective modules and modules over wreath products. In this paper, for a Lawvere theory $\mathcal{C}$ with a zero object, we construct a natural linear PROP $\tilde{\Phi}_{\mathcal{C}}$ together with a canonical adjunction between $\mathcal{C}$-modules and $\tilde{\Phi}_{\mathcal{C}}$-modules. We show that, under suitable conditions on $\mathcal{C}$, the adjunction is compatible with polynomial degree, inducing a correspondence between polynomial $\mathcal{C}$-modules and truncated $\tilde{\Phi}_{\mathcal{C}}$-modules. This framework recovers the constructions of Powell and Pirashvili, while also yielding new examples, including adjunctions for functor categories on modules over a ring, as well as on free nilpotent groups of class $\leq c$ and, more generally, on free $\mathcal{R}$-semisimple groups, where $\mathcal{R}$ is a radical functor for groups.