Orbifold completion of defect bicategories

Abstract

Orbifolds of two-dimensional quantum field theories have a natural formulation in terms of defects or domain walls. This perspective allows for a rich generalisation of the orbifolding procedure, which we study in detail for the case of topological field theories. Namely, a TFT with defects gives rise to a pivotal bicategory of "worldsheet phases" and defects between them. We develop a general framework which takes such a bicategory B as input and returns its "orbifold completion" B_orb. The completion satisfies the natural properties B \subset B_orb and (B_orb)_orb = B_orb, and it gives rise to various new equivalences and nondegeneracy results. When applied to TFTs, the objects in B_orb correspond to generalised orbifolds of the theories in B. In the example of Landau-Ginzburg models we recover and unify conventional equivariant matrix factorisations, prove when and how (generalised) orbifolds again produce open/closed TFTs, and give nontrivial examples of new orbifold equivalences.