Unitary Easy Quantum Groups: the free case and the group case

Easy quantum groups have been studied intensively since the time they were introduced by Banica and Speicher in 2009. They arise as a subclass of ($C^*$-algebraic) compact matrix quantum groups in the sense of Woronowicz. Due to some Tannaka-Krein type result, they are completely determined by the combinatorics of categories of (set theoretical) partitions. So far, only orthogonal easy quantum groups have been considered in order to understand quantum subgroups of the free orthogonal quantum group $O_n^+$. We now give a definition of unitary easy quantum groups using colored partitions to tackle the problem of finding quantum subgroups of $U_n^+$. In the free case (i.e. restricting to noncrossing partitions), the corresponding categories of partitions have recently been classified by the authors by purely combinatorial means. There are ten series showing up each indexed by one or two discrete parameters, plus two additional quantum groups. We now present the quantum group picture of it and investigate them in detail. We show how they can be constructed from other known examples using generalizations of Banica's free complexification. For doing so, we introduce new kinds of products between quantum groups. We also study the notion of easy groups.