Coxeter categories and quantum groups

We define the notion of braided Coxeter category, which is informally a monoidal category carrying compatible, commuting actions of a generalised braid group B_W and Artin’s braid groups B_n on the tensor powers of its objects. The data which defines the action of B_W bears a formal similarity to the associativity constraints in a monoidal category, but is related to the coherence of a family of fiber functors. We show that the quantum Weyl group operators of a quantised Kac–Moody algebra U_{\hbar }{{\mathfrak {g}}}, together with the universal R-matrices of its Levi subalgebras, give rise to a braided Coxeter category structure on integrable, category {\mathcal {O}}-modules for U_{\hbar }{{\mathfrak {g}}}. By relying on the 2-categorical extension of Etingof–Kazhdan quantisation obtained in Appel and Toledano Laredo (Selecta Math NS 24:3529–3617, 2018), we then prove that this structure can be transferred to integrable, category {\mathcal {O}}-representations of {\mathfrak {g}}. These results are used in Appel and Toledano Laredo (arXiv:1512.03041, p 48, 2015) to give a monodromic description of the quantum Weyl group operators of U_{\hbar }{{\mathfrak {g}}}, which extends the one obtained by the second author for a semisimple Lie algebra.