MODULAR CATEGORIES, INTEGRALITY AND EGYPTIAN FRACTIONS Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • It is a well-known result of Etingof, Nikshych and Ostrik that there are finitely many inequivalent integral modular categories of any fixed rank n. This follows from a double-exponential bound on the maximal denominator in an Egyptian fraction representation of 1. A nave computer search approach to the classification of rank n integral modular categories using this bound quickly overwhelms the computer's memory (for n 7). We use a modified strategy: find general conditions on modular categories that imply integrality and study the classification problem in these limited settings. The first such condition isthat the order of the twist matrix is 2, 3, 4 or 6, and we obtain a fairly complete description of these classes of modular categories. The second condition is that the unit object is the only simple non-self-dual object, which is equivalent to odd-dimensionality. In this case we obtain a (linear) improvement on the bounds and employ number-theoretic techniques to obtain a classification for rank at most 11 for odd-dimensional modular categories. 2011 American Mathematical Society.

published proceedings

  • PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY

author list (cited authors)

  • Bruillard, P., & Rowell, E. C.

citation count

  • 5

complete list of authors

  • Bruillard, Paul||Rowell, Eric C

publication date

  • December 2012