Pre-rigid monoidal categories

Liftable pairs of adjoint functors between braided monoidal categories in the sense of [GV1] provide auto-adjunctions between the associated categories of bialgebras. Motivated by finding interesting examples of such pairs, we study general pre-rigid monoidal categories. Roughly speaking, these are monoidal categories in which for every object X, an object X* and a nicely behaving evaluation map from X* circle times X to the unit object exist. A prototypical example is the category of vector spaces over a field, where X* is not a categorical dual if X is not finite-dimensional. We explore the connection with related notions such as right closedness, and present meaningful examples. We also study the categorical frameworks for Turaev's Hopf group-(co)algebras in the light of pre-rigidity and closedness, filling some gaps in literature along the way. Finally, we show that braided pre-rigid monoidal categories indeed provide an appropriate setting for liftability in the sense of loc. cit. and we present an application, varying on the theme of vector spaces, showing how -in favorable cases-the notion of pre-rigidity allows to construct liftable pairs of adjoint functors when right closedness of the category is not available.