The Grothendieck Construction and Gradings for Enriched Categories

The Grothendieck construction is a process to form a single category from a diagram of small categories. In this paper, we extend the definition of the Grothendieck construction to diagrams of small categories enriched over a symmetric monoidal category satisfying certain conditions. Symmetric monoidal categories satisfying the conditions in this paper include the category of k-modules over a commutative ring k, the category of chain complexes, the category of simplicial sets, the category of topological spaces, and the category of modern spectra. In particular, we obtain a generalization of the orbit category construction in [CM06]. We also extend the notion of graded categories and show that the Grothendieck construction takes values in the category of graded categories. Our definition of graded category does not require any coproduct decompositions and generalizes k-linear graded categories indexed by small categories defined in [Low08]. There are two popular ways to construct functors from the category of graded categories to the category of oplax functors. One of them is the smash product construction defined and studied in [CM06, Asaa, Asab] for k-linear categories and the other one is the fiber functor. We construct extensions of these functors for enriched categories and show that they are “right adjoint” to the Grothendieck construction in suitable senses. As a byproduct, we obtain a new short description of small enriched categories.