Which abelian tensor categories are geometric?

For a large class of geometric objects, the passage to categories of quasi-coherent sheaves provides an embedding in the 2-category of abelian tensor categories. The notion of weakly Tannakian categories introduced by the author gives a characterization of tensor categories in the image of this embedding.However, this notion requires additional structure to be present, namely a fiber functor. For the case of classical Tannakian categories in characteristic zero, Deligne has found intrinsic properties—expressible entirely within the language of tensor categories—which are necessary and sufficient for the existence of a fiber functor. In this paper we generalize Deligne’s result to weakly Tannakian categories in characteristic zero. The class of geometric objects whose tensor categories of quasi-coherent sheaves can be recognized in this manner includes both the gerbes arising in classical Tannaka duality and more classical geometric objects such as projective varieties over a field of characteristic zero.Our proof uses a different perspective on fiber functors, which we formalize through the notion of geometric tensor categories. A second application of this perspective allows us to describe categories of quasi-coherent sheaves on fiber products.