Abstract cubical homotopy theory

Abstract: Triangulations and higher triangulations axiomatize the calculus of derived cokernels when applied to strings of composable morphisms. While there are no cubical versions of (higher) triangulations, in this paper we use coherent diagrams to develop some aspects of a rich cubical calculus. Applied to the models in the background, this enhances the typical examples of triangulated and tensor-triangulated categories. The main players are the cardinality filtration of n-cubes, the induced interpolation between cocartesian and strongly cocartesian n-cubes, and the yoga of iterated cone constructions. In the stable case, the representation theories of chunks of n-cubes are related by compatible strong stable equivalences and admit a global form of Serre duality. As sample applications, we use these Serre equivalences to express colimits in terms of limits and to relate the abstract representation theories of chunks by infinite chains of adjunctions. On a more abstract side, along the way we establish a general decomposition result for colimits, which specializes to the classical Bousfield-Kan formulas. We also include a short discussion of abstract formulas and their compatibility with morphisms, leading to the idea of universal formulas in monoidal homotopy theories.