A physical system is said to be in topological phase if at low energies and long wavelengths the observable quantities are invariant under diffeomorphisms. Such physical systems are of great interest in condensed matter physics and computer science where they can be applied to form topological insulators and fault–tolerant quantum computers. Physical systems in topological phase may be rigorously studied through their algebraic manifestations, (pre)modular categories. A complete classification of these categories would lead to a taxonomy of the topological phases of matter. Beyond their ties to physical systems, premodular categories are of general mathematical interest as they govern the representation theories of quasi–Hopf algebras, lead to manifold and link invariants, and provide insights into the braid group. In the course of this work, we study the classification problem for (pre)modular categories with particular attention paid to their arithmetic properties. Central to our analysis is the question of rank finiteness for modular categories, also known as Wang’s Conjecture. In this work, we lay this problem to rest by exploiting certain arithmetic properties of modular categories. While the rank finiteness problem for premodular categories is still open, we provide new methods for approaching this problem. The arithmetic techniques suggested by the rank finiteness analysis are particularly pronounced in the (weakly) integral setting. There, we use Diophantine techniques to classify all weakly integral modular categories through rank 6 up to Grothendieck equivalence. In the case that the category is not only weakly integral, but actually integral, the analysis is further extended to produce a classification of integral modular categories up to Grothendieck equivalence through rank 7. It is observed that such classification can be extended provided some mild assumptions are made. For instance, if we further assume that the category is also odd–dimensional, then the classification up to Grothendieck equivalence is completed through rank 11. Moving beyond modular categories has historically been difficult. We suggest new methods for doing this inspired by our work on (weakly) integral modular categories and related problems in algebraic number theory. The allows us to produce a Grothendieck classification of rank 4 premodular categories thereby extending the previously known rank 3 classification.

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The main goal of this thesis is to construct a tensor product on the 2-category BFC-A of braided fusion categories containing a symmetric fusion category A. We achieve this by introducing the new notion of Z(A)-crossed braided categories. These are categories enriched over the Drinfeld centre Z(A) of the symmetric fusion category. We show that Z(A) admits an additional symmetric tensor structure, which makes it into a 2-fold monoidal category. ByTannaka duality, A= Rep(G) (or Rep(G; w)) for a finite group G (or finite super-group (G,w)). Under this identication Z(A) = VectG[G], the category of G-equivariant vector bundles over G, and we show that the symmetric tensor product corresponds to (a super version of) to the brewise tensor product. We use the additional symmetric tensor product on Z(A) to define the composition in Z(A)-crossed braided categories, whereas the usual tensor product is used for the monoidal structure. We further require this monoidal structure to be braided for the switch map that uses the braiding in Z(A). We show that the 2-category Z(A)-XBF is equivalent to both BFC=A and the 2-category of (super)-G-crossed braided categories. Using the former equivalence, the reduced tensor product on BFC-A is dened in terms of the enriched Cartesian product of Z(A)-enriched categories on Z(A)-XBF. The reduced tensor product obtained in this way has as unit Z(A). It induces a pairing between minimal modular extensions of categories having A as their Mueger centre.

Let (W, S) be an arbitrary Coxeter system, and let J be the asymptotic Hecke algebra associated to (W, S) via Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials by Lusztig. We study a subalgebra J_C of J corresponding to the subregular cell C of W . We prove a factorization theorem that allows us to compute products in J_C without inputs from Kazhdan-Lusztig theory, then discuss two applications of this result. First, we describe J_C in terms of the Coxeter diagram of (W, S) in the case (W, S) is simply- laced, and deduce more connections between the diagram and J_C in some other cases. Second, we prove that for certain specific Coxeter systems, some subalgebras of J_C are free fusion rings, thereby connecting the algebras to compact quantum groups arising in operator algebra theory.

Les catégories de fusion pointées sont des catégories de fusion pour lesquelles les objets simples sont inversibles. Nous développons des méthodes basés par ordinateur pour classifier les catégories pointées à équivalence de Morita près, et les appliquons aux catégories pointées de dimensions comprises entre 2 et 32. Nous prouvons qu'il existe 1126 classes de Morita pour de telles catégories. Aussi, nous prouvons que les indicateurs de Frobenius-Schur du centre d'une catégorie pointée de dimension inférieure à 32, accompagnés de structure enrubannée de ce centre, déterminent sa classe de Morita. Ceci est faux en général: les données modulaires, et donc a fortiori les indicateurs et structures enrubannées, ne distinguent pas les catégories modulaires. Nous donnons une famille d'exemples ; en réalité, il existe un nombre arbitrairement grand de catégories modulaires deux-à-deux non équivalentes qui peuvent partager les mêmes données modulaires. / Pointed fusion categories are fusion categories in which all simple objects are invertible. We develop computer-based methods to classify pointed categories up to Morita equivalence, and apply them to pointed fusion categories of dimension from 2 to 31. We prove that there are 1126 Morita classes of such categories. Also, we prove that the Frobenius-Schur indicators of the centers of a pointed category of dimension less than 32, along with its ribbon twist, determine its Morita class. This is not true in general: the modular data, and a fortiori the indicators and the ribbon twists, do not distinguish modular categories. We give a family of examples; in fact, arbitrarly many pairwise non-equivalent modular categories can share the same modular data.