Butterflies in a Semi-Abelian Context

It is known that monoidal functors between internal groupoids in the category Grp of groups constitute the bicategory of fractions of the 2-category Grpd(Grp) of internal groupoids, internal functors and internal natural transformations in Grp, with respect to weak equivalences (that is, internal functors which are internally fully faithful and essentially surjective on objects). Monoidal functors can be equivalently described by a kind of weak morphisms introduced by B. Noohi under the name of butterflies. In order to internalize monoidal functors in a wide context, we introduce the notion of internal butterflies between internal crossed modules in a semi-abelian category C, and we show th…