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Quasitrace

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In mathematics, especially functional analysis, a quasitrace is a not necessarily additive tracial functional on a C*-algebra. An additive quasitrace is called a trace. It is a major open problem if every quasitrace is a trace.

Definition

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A quasitrace on a C*-algebra A is a map such that:

  • is homogeneous:
for every and .
  • is tracial:
for every .
  • is additive on commuting elements:

for every that satisfy .

  • and such that for each the induced map

has the same properties.

A quasitrace is:

  • bounded if
  • normalized if
  • lower semicontinuous if
is closed for each .

Variants

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  • A 1-quasitrace is a map that is just homogeneous, tracial and additive on commuting elements, but does not necessarily extend to such a map on matrix algebras over A. If a 1-quasitrace extends to the matrix algebra , then it is called a n-quasitrace. There are examples of 1-quasitraces that are not 2-quasitraces. One can show that every 2-quasitrace is automatically a n-quasitrace for every . Sometimes in the literature, a quasitrace means a 1-quasitrace and a 2-quasitrace means a quasitrace.

Properties

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  • A quasitrace that is additive on all elements is called a trace.
  • Uffe Haagerup showed that every quasitrace on a unital, exact C*-algebra is additive and thus a trace. The article of Haagerup [1] was circulated as handwritten notes in 1991 and remained unpublished until 2014. Blanchard and Kirchberg removed the assumption of unitality in Haagerup's result.[2] As of today (August 2020) it remains an open problem if every quasitrace is additive.
  • Joachim Cuntz showed that a simple, unital C*-algebra is stably finite if and only if it admits a dimension function. A simple, unital C*-algebra is stably finite if and only if it admits a normalized quasitrace. An important consequence is that every simple, unital, stably finite, exact C*-algebra admits a tracial state.

Notes

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  1. ^ (Haagerup 2014)
  2. ^ Blanchard, Kirchberg, 2004, Remarks 2.29(i)

References

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  • Blanchard, Etienne; Kirchberg, Eberhard (February 2004). "Non-simple purely infinite C∗-algebras: the Hausdorff case" (PDF). Journal of Functional Analysis. 207 (2): 461–513. doi:10.1016/j.jfa.2003.06.008.
  • Haagerup, Uffe (2014). "Quasitraces on Exact C*-algebras are Traces". C. R. Math. Rep. Acad. Sci. Canada. 36: 67–92.