Cohomology of idempotent braidings, with applications to factorizable monoids

Abstract: We develop new methods for computing the Hochschild (co)homology of monoids which can be presented as the structure monoids of idempotent set-theoretic solutions to the Yang--Baxter equation. These include free and symmetric monoids; factorizable monoids, for which we find a generalization of the K{\"u}nneth formula for direct products; and plactic monoids. Our key result is an identification of the (co)homologies in question with those of the underlying YBE solutions, via the explicit quantum symmetrizer map. This partially answers questions of Farinati--Garc{\'i}a-Galofre and Dilian Yang. We also obtain new structural results on the (co)homology of general YBE solutions.