Central extensions of associative algebras and weakly action representable categories

Abstract: A central extension is a regular epimorphism in a Barr exact category $\mathscr{C}$ satisfying suitable conditions involving a given Birkhoff subcategory of $\mathscr{C}$ (joint work with G. M. Kelly, 1994). In this paper we take $\mathscr{C}$ to be the category of (not-necessarily-unital) algebras over a (unital) commutative ring and consider central extensions with respect to the category of commutative algebras. We propose a new approach that avoids the intermediate notion of central extension due to A. Fr\"ohlich in showing that $\alpha:A\to B$ is a central extension if and only if $aa'=a'a$ for all $a,a'\in A$ with $\alpha(a')=0$. This approach motivates introducing what we call $\textit{weakly action representable categories}$, and we show that such categories are always action accessible. We also make remarks on what we call $\textit{initial weak representations of actions}$ and formulate several open questions.