Categories of two-colored pair partitions Part II: Categories indexed by semigroups

Abstract

Within the framework of unitary easy quantum groups, we study an analogue of Brauer’s Schur-Weyl approach to the representation theory of the orthogonal group. We consider concrete combinatorial categories whose morphisms are formed by partitions of finite sets into disjoint subsets of cardinality two; the points of these sets are colored black or white. These categories correspond to “half-liberated easy” interpolations between the unitary group and Wang’s quantum counterpart. We complete the classification of all such categories demonstrating that the subcategories of a certain natural halfway point are equivalent to additive subsemigroups of the natural numbers; the categories above this halfway point have been classified in a preceding article. We achieve this using combinatorial means exclusively. Our work reveals that the half-liberation procedure is quite different from what was previously known from the orthogonal case.