Hochschild homology, lax codescent, and duplicial structure

Abstract

We study the duplicial objects of Dwyer and Kan, which generalize the cyclic objects of Connes. We describe duplicial objects in terms of the decalage comonads, and we give a conceptual account of the construction of duplicial objects due to Böhm and Ştefan. This is done in terms of a 2-categorical generalization of Hochschild homology. We also study duplicial structure on nerves of categories, bicategories, and monoidal categories.