Monoidal categories and the Gerstenhaber bracket in Hochschild cohomology

Abstract: In this monograph, we extend S. Schwede's exact sequence interpretation of the Gerstenhaber bracket in Hochschild cohomology to certain exact and monoidal categories. Therefore we establish an explicit description of an isomorphism by A. Neeman and V. Retakh, which links $\mathrm{Ext}$-groups with fundamental groups of categories of extensions and relies on expressing the fundamental group of a (small) category by means of the associated Quillen groupoid. As a main result, we show that our construction behaves well with respect to structure preserving functors between exact monoidal categories. We use our main result to conclude, that both the Lie bracket and the squaring map in Hochschild cohomology are invariants under Morita equivalence. For quasi-triangular bialgebras, we further determine a significant part of the Lie bracket's kernel, and thereby prove a conjecture by L. Menichi. Along the way, we introduce $n$-extension closed and entirely extension closed subcategories of abelian categories, and study some of their properties.