Integrability from categorification

Hank Chen, Florian Girelli

Published 2023-07-07Version 1

The theory of Poisson-Lie groups and Lie bialgebras plays a major role in the study of one dimensional integrable systems. Many families of integrable systems can be recovered from a Lax pair which is constructed from a Lie bialgebra associated to a Poisson-Lie group. Some categorified notions of Poisson Lie groups and Lie bialgebras has been proposed using $L_2$-algebras (arXiv:1109.1344 and arxiv:1202.0079), which gave rise to the notions of (strict) Lie 2-bialgebras and Poisson-Lie 2-groups . In this paper, we use these structures to generalize the construction of a Lax pair and introduce an appropriate notion of {categorified integrability}. Within this framework, we explicitly construct and analyze the 2-dimensional version of the XXX model, whose dynamics is governed by an underlying Lie 2-bialgebra. We emphasize that the 2-graded form of our categorified notion of integrability directly implies the 2-dimensional nature of the degrees-of-freedom in our theory.