Congruence Subgroups and Generalized Frobenius-Schur Indicators

We introduce generalized Frobenius-Schur indicators for pivotal categories. In a spherical fusion category \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {C}}$$\end{document} , an equivariant indicator of an object in \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {C}}$$\end{document} is defined as a functional on the Grothendieck algebra of the quantum double \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${Z(\mathcal {C})}$$\end{document} via generalized Frobenius-Schur indicators. The set of all equivariant indicators admits a natural action of the modular group. Using the properties of equivariant indicators, we prove a congruence subgroup theorem for modular categories. As a consequence, all modular representations of a modular category have finite images, and they satisfy a conjecture of Eholzer. In addition, we obtain two formulae for the generalized indicators, one of them a generalization of Bantay’s second indicator formula for a rational conformal field theory. This formula implies a conjecture of Pradisi-Sagnotti-Stanev, as well as a conjecture of Borisov-Halpern-Schweigert.