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Tag: Connes

“God given time”

Published February 20, 2008 by lieven

If you ever sat through a lecture by Alain Connes you will know about his insistence on the ‘canonical dynamic nature of noncommutative manifolds’. If you haven’t, he did write a blog post Heart bit 1 about it.

I’ll try to explain here that there is a definite “supplément d’âme” obtained in the transition from classical (commutative) spaces to the noncommutative ones. The main new feature is that “noncommutative spaces generate their own time” and moreover can undergo thermodynamical operations such as cooling, distillation etc…

Here a section from his paper A view of mathematics :

Indeed even at the coarsest level of understanding of a space provided by measure
theory, which in essence only cares about the “quantity of points” in a space, one
finds unexpected completely new features in the noncommutative case. While it
had been long known by operator algebraists that the theory of von-Neumann
algebras represents a far reaching extension of measure theory, the main surprise
which occurred at the beginning of the seventies is that such an algebra M
inherits from its noncommutativity a god-given time evolution:

$\delta~:~\mathbb{R} \rightarrow Out(M) $

where $Out M = Aut M/Int M $ is the quotient of the group of automorphisms of M
by the normal subgroup of inner automorphisms. This led in my thesis to the
reduction from type III to type II and their automorphisms and eventually to the
classification of injective factors.

Even a commutative manifold has a kind of dynamics associated to it. Take a suitable vectorfield, consider the flow determined by it and there’s your ‘dynamics’, or a one-parameter group of automorphisms on the functions. Further, other classes of noncommutative algebras have similar features. For example, Cuntz and Quillen showed that also formally smooth algebras (the noncommutative manifolds in the algebraic world) have natural Yang-Mills flows associated to them, giving a one-parameter subgroup of automorphisms.

Let us try to keep far from mysticism and let us agree that by ‘time’ (let alone ‘god given time’) we mean a one-parameter subgroup of algebra automorphisms of the noncommutative algebra. In nice cases, such as some von-Neumann algebras this canonical subgroup is canonical in the sense that it is unique upto inner automorphisms.

In the special case of the Bost-Connes algebra these automorphisms $\sigma_t $ are given by $\sigma_t(X_n) = n^{it} X_n $ and $\sigma_t(Y_{\lambda}) = Y_{\lambda} $.

This one-parameter subgroup is crucial in the definition of the so called KMS-states (for Kubo-Martin and Schwinger) which is our next goal.

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i’ll take rerun requests

Published February 8, 2008 by lieven

If you write a comment-provoking post (such as that one), you’d better deal with the reactions.

As often, the bluntest comment came from the Granada-Antwerp commuter (aka “mewt” for ‘memories of a weird traveler’…)

Javier :

Concerning the participation on the math-related posts, it is true that what you write has become more readable along the years, but yet, being able to read one of your math posts and catch the idea of what is going on (which I think is a great thing to do) is one thing. Actually understanding the details is a completely different one. And possibly most people thinks that commenting around when you only got the general idea (if any) of some math topic would be rather bold.

Personally, with your 2 last posts concerning Connes-Bost systems I am interested on understanding the story in full detail, so I printed your first post, took it home, read it carefully, made all the computations on my own (not that I dont trust yours, but you never know!) and before I had finished getting a sound impression of what was going on, the second part was already online, so had to go through the same process (in top of usual duties) just to keep your rythm. If things go as usual, by the time I am ready to make any sensible comments, you’ll be already bored of the topic and have switched to something else, so it won’t make much sense commenting at all!If its comments what you’re lasting for, write short, one-idea posts, rather than long, technically detailed ones.

The good news is that my posts become slightly more understandable. But all things can be improved… so, here’s a request :

If there is this one post you’d love to understand if only you knew already the material I subconsciously assumed, tell me or leave a comment!

and I’ll try to improve on it…

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abc on adelic Bost-Connes

Published February 2, 2008 by lieven

The adelic interpretation of the Bost-Connes Hecke algebra $\mathcal{H} $ is based on three facts we’ve learned so far :

  1. The diagonal embedding of the rational numbers $\delta~:~\mathbb{Q} \rightarrow \prod_p \mathbb{Q}_p $ has its image in the adele ring $\mathcal{A} $. ( details )

  2. There is an exact sequence of semigroups $1 \rightarrow \mathcal{G} \rightarrow \mathcal{I} \cap \mathcal{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{N}^+_{\times} \rightarrow 1 $ where $\mathcal{I} $ is the idele group, that is the units of $\mathcal{A} $, where $\mathcal{R} = \prod_p \mathbb{Z}_p $ and where $\mathcal{G} $ is the group (!) $\prod_p \mathbb{Z}_p^* $. ( details )

  3. There is an isomorphism of additive groups $\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z} \simeq \mathcal{A}/\mathcal{R} $. ( details )

Because $\mathcal{R} $ is a ring we have that $a\mathcal{R} \subset \mathcal{R} $ for any $a=(a_p)_p \in \mathcal{I} \cap \mathcal{R} $. Therefore, we have an induced ‘multiplication by $a $’ morphism on the additive group $\mathcal{A}/\mathcal{R} \rightarrow^{a.} \mathcal{A}/\mathcal{R} $ which is an epimorphism for all $a \in \mathcal{I} \cap \mathcal{R} $.

In fact, it is easy to see that the equation $a.x = y $ for $y \in \mathcal{A}/\mathcal{R} $ has precisely $n_a = \prod_p p^{d(a)} $ solutions. In particular, for any $a \in \mathcal{G} = \prod_p \mathbb{Z}_p^* $, multiplication by $a $ is an isomorphism on $\mathcal{A}/\mathcal{R} = \mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z} $.

But then, we can form the crystalline semigroup graded skew-group algebra $\mathbb{Q}(\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z}) \bowtie (\mathcal{I} \cap \mathcal{R}) $. It is the graded vectorspace $\oplus_{a \in \mathcal{I} \cap \mathcal{R}} X_a \mathbb{Q}[\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z}] $ with commutation relation
$Y_{\lambda}X_a = X_a Y_{a \lambda} $ for the base-vectors $Y_{\lambda} $ with $\lambda \in \mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z} $. Recall from last time we need to use approximation (or the Chinese remainder theorem) to determine the class of $a \lambda $ in $\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z} $.

We can also extend it to a bi-crystalline graded algebra because multiplication by $a \in \mathcal{I} \cap \mathcal{R} $ has a left-inverse which determines the commutation relations $Y_{\lambda} X_a^* = X_a^* (\frac{1}{n_a})(\sum_{a.\mu = \lambda} Y_{\mu}) $. Let us call this bi-crystalline graded algebra $\mathcal{H}_{big} $, then we have the following facts

  1. For every $a \in \mathcal{G} $, the element $X_a $ is a unit in $\mathcal{H}_{big} $ and $X_a^{-1}=X_a^* $. Conjugation by $X_a $ induces on the subalgebra $\mathbb{Q}[\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z}] $ the map $Y_{\lambda} \rightarrow Y_{a \lambda} $.

  2. Using the diagonal embedding $\delta $ restricted to $\mathbb{N}^+_{\times} $ we get an embedding of algebras $\mathcal{H} \subset \mathcal{H}_{big} $ and conjugation by $X_a $ for any $a \in \mathcal{G} $ sends $\mathcal{H} $ to itself. However, as the $X_a \notin \mathcal{H} $, the induced automorphisms are now outer!

Summarizing : the Bost-Connes Hecke algebra $\mathcal{H} $ encodes a lot of number-theoretic information :

  • the additive structure is encoded in the sub-algebra which is the group-algebra $\mathbb{Q}[\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z}] $
  • the multiplicative structure in encoded in the epimorphisms given by multiplication with a positive natural number (the commutation relation with the $X_m $
  • the automorphism group of $\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z} $ extends to outer automorphisms of $\mathcal{H} $

That is, the Bost-Connes algebra can be seen as a giant mashup of number-theory of $\mathbb{Q} $. So, if one can prove something specific about this algebra, it is bound to have interesting number-theoretic consequences.

But how will we study $\mathcal{H} $? Well, the bi-crystalline structure of it tells us that $\mathcal{H} $ is a ‘good’-graded algebra with part of degree one the group-algebra $\mathbb{Q}[\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z}] $. This group-algebra is a formally smooth algebra and we study such algebras by studying their finite dimensional representations.

Hence, we should study ‘good’-graded formally smooth algebras (such as $\mathcal{H} $) by looking at their graded representations. This will then lead us to Connes’ “fabulous states”…

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