The Jiang-Su algebra revisited

We give a number of new characterizations of the Jiang-Su algebra Z, both intrinsic and extrinsic, in terms of C*-algebraic, dynamical, topological and K-theoretic conditions. Along the way we study divisibility properties of C*-algebras, we give a precise characterization of those unital C*-algebras of stable rank one that admit a unital embedding of the dimension-drop C*-algebra Z_{n,n+1}, and we prove a cancellation theorem for the Cuntz semigroup of C*-algebras of stable rank one.