On analytic contravariant functors on free groups

Abstract: Working over a field $k$ of characteristic zero, the category of analytic contravariant functors on the category of finitely-generated free groups is shown to be equivalent to the category of representations of the $k$-linear category associated to the Lie operad. Two proofs are given of this result. The first uses the original Ginzburg-Kapranov approach to Koszul duality of binary quadratic operads and the fact that the category of analytic contravariant functors is Koszul. The second proof proceeds by making the equivalence explicit using the $k$-linear category associated to the operad encoding unital associative algebras, which provides the `twisting bimodule'. A key ingredient is the Poincar\'e-Birkhoff-Witt theorem. Using the explicit formulation, it is shown how this equivalence reflects the tensor product on the category of analytic contravariant functors, relating this to the convolution product for representations of the category associated to the Lie operad.