Bifold Algebras and Commutants for Enriched Algebraic Theories

Commuting pairs of algebraic structures on a set have been studied by several authors and may be described equivalently as algebras for the tensor product of Lawvere theories, or more basically as certain bifunctors that here we call bifold algebras. The much less studied notion of commutant for Lawvere theories was first introduced by Wraith and generalizes the notion of centralizer clone in universal algebra. Working in the general setting of enriched algebraic theories for a system of arities, we study the interaction of the concepts of bifold algebra and commutant. We show that the notion of commutant arises via a universal construction in a two-sided fibration of bifold algebras over various theories. On this basis, we study special classes of bifold algebras that are related to commutants, introducing the notions of commutant bifold algebra and balanced bifold algebra. We establish several adjunctions and equivalences among these categories of bifold algebras and related categories of algebras over various theories, including commutative, contracommutative, saturated, and balanced algebras. We also survey and develop examples of commutant bifold algebras, including examples that employ Pontryagin duality and a theorem of Ehrenfeucht and Łoś on reflexive abelian groups. Along the way, we develop a functorial treatment of fundamental aspects of bifold algebras and commutants, including tensor products of theories and the equivalence of bifold algebras and commuting pairs of algebras. Because we work relative to a (possibly large) system of arities in a closed category \({\mathscr {V}}\), our main results are applicable to arbitrary \({\mathscr {V}}\)-monads on a finitely complete \({\mathscr {V}}\), the enriched theories of Borceux and Day, the enriched Lawvere theories of Power relative to a regular cardinal, and other notions of algebraic theory.