Monoidal Ringel duality and monoidal highest weight envelopes

Abstract

We show that a large class of non-abelian monoidal categories can be realized as subcategories of tilting objects in abelian monoidal categories with a highest weight structure. The construction relies on a monoidal enhancement of Brundan-Stroppel's semi-infinite Ringel duality and applies to many of Sam-Snowden's triangular categories and Knop's tensor envelopes of regular categories. We also explain how monoidal Ringel duality gives rise to monoidal structures on categories of representations of affine Lie algebras at positive levels.