A general form of contractive idempotent functionals on coamenable locally compact quantum groups is obtained, generalising the result of Greenleaf on contractive measures on locally compact groups. The image of a convolution operator associated to a contractive idempotent is shown to be a ternary ring of operators. As a consequence a one-to-one correspondence between contractive idempotents and a certain class of ternary rings of operators is established.
Correspondence between idempotent states and expected right-invariant subalgebras is extended to non-coamenable, non-unimodular locally compact quantum groups; in particular left convolution operators are shown to automatically preserve the right Haar weight.
This is a short survey on idempotent states on locally compact groups and locally compact quantum groups. The central topic is the relationship between idempotent states, subgroups and invariant C*-subalgebras. We concentrate on recent results on locally compact quantum groups, but begin with the classical notion of idempotent probability measure. We also consider the `intermediate case of idempotent states in the Fourier--Stieltjes algebra: this is the dual case of idempotent probability measures and so an instance of idempotent states on a locally compact quantum group.
Every symmetric generating functional of a convolution semigroup of states on a locally compact quantum group is shown to admit a dense unital $*$-subalgebra with core-like properties in its domain. On the other hand we prove that every normalised, symmetric, hermitian conditionally positive functional on a dense $*$-subalgebra of the unitisation of the universal C$^*$-algebra of a locally compact quantum group, satisfying certain technical conditions, extends in a canonical way to a generating functional. Some consequences of these results are outlined, notably those related to constructing cocycles out of convolution semigroups.
Suppose that a compact quantum group $clq$ acts faithfully on a smooth, compact, connected manifold $M$, i.e. has a $C^*$ (co)-action $alpha$ on $C(M)$, such that the action $alpha$ is isometric in the sense of cite{Goswami} for some Riemannian structure on $M$. We prove that $clq$ must be commutative as a $C^{ast}$ algebra i.e. $clqcong C(G)$ for some compact group $G$ acting smoothly on $M$. In particular, the quantum isometry group of $M$ (in the sense of cite{Goswami}) coincides with $C(ISO(M))$.
The spectral functor of an ergodic action of a compact quantum group G on a unital C*-algebra is quasitensor, in the sense that the tensor product of two spectral subspaces is isometrically contained in the spectral subspace of the tensor product representation, and the inclusion maps satisfy natural properties. We show that any quasitensor *-functor from Rep(G) to the category of Hilbert spaces is the spectral functor of an ergodic action of G on a unital C*-algebra. As an application, we associate an ergodic G-action on a unital C*-algebra to an inclusion of Rep(G) into an abstract tensor C*-category. If the inclusion arises from a quantum subgroup of G, the associated G-system is just the quantum quotient space. If G is a group and the category has permutation symmetry, the associated system is commutative, and therefore isomorphic to the classical quotient space by a closed subgroup of $G$. If a tensor C*-category has a Hecke symmetry making an object of dimension d and q-quantum determinant one then there is an ergodic action of S_qU(d) on a unital C*-algebra, having the spaces of intertwiners from the tensor unit to powers of the object as its spectral subspaces. The special case od S_qU(2) is discussed.