Weak Projections onto a Braided Hopf Algebra

We show that, under some mild conditions, a bialgebra in an abelian and coabelian braided monoidal category has a weak projection onto a formally smooth (as a coalgebra) sub-bialgebra with antipode; see Theorem 1.14. In the second part of the paper we prove that bialgebras with weak projections are cross product bialgebras; see Theorem 2.12. In the particular case when the bialgebra A is cocommutative and a certain cocycle associated to the weak projection is trivial we prove that A is a double cross product, or biproduct in Madjid’s terminology. The last result is based on a universal property of double cross products which, by Theorem 2.15, works in braided monoidal categories. We also investigate the situation when the right action of the associated matched pair is trivial.