English

Traces, Ultrapowers and the Pedersen-Petersen C*-Algebras

Operator Algebras 2017-02-10 v1

Abstract

Our motivating question was whether all traces on a U-ultrapower of a C*-algebra A, where U is a non-principal ultrafilter on N, are necessarily U-limits of traces on A. We show that this is false so long as A has infinitely many extremal traces, and even exhibit a 2^c size family of such traces on the ultrapower. For this to fail even when A has finitely many traces implies that A contains operators that can be expressed as sums of n+1 but not n *-commutators, for arbitrarily large n. We show that this happens for a direct sum of Pedersen-Petersen C*-algebras, and analyze some other interesting properties of these C*-algebras.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1307.0111,
  title  = {Traces, Ultrapowers and the Pedersen-Petersen C*-Algebras},
  author = {Tristan Bice and Ilijas Farah},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.0111},
  year   = {2017}
}