In a very celebrated paper A. Connes has formulated a conjecture which is now one of the most important open problem in Operator Algebras. This importance comes from the works of many mathematicians who have found some unexpected equivalent statements showing as this conjecture is transversal to almost all the sub-specialization of Operator Algebras. In this survey I would like to give a more or less detailed description of all these approaches.
In this paper we formulate a conjecture which is a strengthening of an extension theorem of Bakonyi and Timotin for positive definite functions on the free group on two generators. We prove that this conjecture implies Connes' embedding conjecture.
We introduce a notion of fibred coarse embedding into Hilbert space for metric spaces, which is a generalization of Gromov's notion of coarse embedding into Hilbert space. It turns out that a large class of expander graphs admit such an embedding. We show that the maximal coarse Baum-Connes conjecture holds for metric spaces with bounded geometry which admit a fibred coarse embedding into Hilbert space.
This is an expanded lecture note for "Masterclass on sofic groups and applications to operator algebras" (University of Copenhagen, 5-9 November 2012). It is about algebraic aspects of the Connes Embedding Conjecture. It contains new proofs of equivalence of the Connes Embedding Conjecture, Positivstellensatze for trace positive polynomials, Kirchberg's Conjecture, and Tsirelson's Problem.
The connection between the coarse geometry of metric spaces and analytic properties of topological groupoids is well known. One of the main results of Skandalis, Tu and Yu is that a space admits a coarse embedding into Hilbert space if and only if a certain associated topological groupoid is a-T-menable. This groupoid characterisation then reduces the proof that the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture holds for a coarsely embeddable space to known results for a-T-menable groupoids. The property of admitting a fibred coarse embedding into Hilbert space was introduced by Chen, Wang and Yu to provide a…
In a recent paper, the concept of synchronous quantum correlation matrices was introduced and these were shown to correspond to traces on certain C*-algebras. In particular, synchronous correlation matrices arose in their study of various versions of quantum chromatic numbers of graphs and other quantum versions of graph theoretic parameters. In this paper we develop these ideas further, focusing on the relations between synchronous correlation matrices and microstates. We prove that Connes' embedding conjecture is equivalent to the equality of two families of synchronous quantum correlation m…
The equivariant coarse Novikov conjecture provides an algorithm for determining nonvanishing of equivariant higher index of elliptic differential operators on noncompact manifolds. In this article, we prove the equivariant coarse Novikov conjecture under certain coarse embeddability conditions. More precisely, if a discrete group $Γ$ acts on a bounded geometric space $X$ properly, isometrically, and with bounded distortion, $X/Γ$ and $Γ$ admit coarse embeddings into Hilbert space, then the $Γ$-equivariant coarse Novikov conjecture holds for $X$. Here bounded distortion means that for any $γ\in…
We show that Connes' embedding conjecture on von Neumann algebras is equivalent to the existence of certain algebraic certificates for a polynomial in noncommuting variables to satisfy the following nonnegativity condition: The trace is nonnegative whenever self-adjoint contraction matrices of the same size are substituted for the variables. These algebraic certificates involve sums of hermitian squares and commutators. We prove that they always exist for a similar nonnegativity condition where elements of separable II_1-factors are considered instead of matrices. Under the presence of Connes'…
Sofic and hyperlinear groups are the countable discrete groups that can be approximated in a suitable sense by finite symmetric groups and groups of unitary matrices. These notions turned out to be very deep and fruitful, and stimulated in the last 15 years an impressive amount of research touching several seemingly distant areas of mathematics including geometric group theory, operator algebras, dynamical systems, graph theory, and more recently even quantum information theory. Several longstanding conjectures that are still open for arbitrary groups were settled in the case of sofic or hyper…
We define a new numerical range of an n\timesn complex matrix in terms of correlation matrices and develop some of its properties. We also define a related numerical range that arises from Alain Connes' famous embedding problem.
The equivariant coarse Baum-Connes conjecture was firstly introduced by Roe [29] as a unified way to approach both the Baum-Connes conjecture and its coarse counterpart. In this paper, we prove that if an a-T-menable group $Γ$ acts properly and isometrically on a bounded geometry metric space $X$ with controlled distortion such that the quotient space $X/Γ$ is coarsely embeddable, then the equivariant coarse Baum-Connes conjecture holds for this action. This answers a question posed in [8] affirmatively.
We introduce a new variant of the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture designed to tackle coarsely disconnected metric spaces called the boundary coarse Baum-Connes conjecture. We prove this conjecture for many coarsely disconnected spaces that are known to be counterexamples to the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture. In particular, we give a geometric proof of this conjecture for spaces of graphs that have large girth and bounded vertex degree. We then connect the boundary conjecture to the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture using homological methods, which allows us to exhibit all the current uniformly discr…
This is a detailed survey on the QWEP conjecture and Connes' embedding problem. Most of contents are taken from Kirchberg's paper [Invent. Math. 112 (1993)].
In this paper, we connect the rigidity problem and the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture for Roe algebras. In particular, we show that if $X$ and $Y$ are two uniformly locally finite metric spaces such that their Roe algebras are $*$-isomorphic, then $X$ and $Y$ are coarsely equivalent provided either $X$ or $Y$ satisfies the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture with coefficients. It is well-known that coarse embeddability into a Hilbert space implies the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture with coefficients. On the other hand, we provide a new example of a finitely generated group satisfying the coarse Baum-C…
We reformulate the Baum-Connes conjecture with coefficients by introducing a new crossed product functor for C*-algebras. All confirming examples for the original Baum-Connes conjecture remain confirming examples for the reformulated conjecture, and at present there are no known counterexamples to the reformulated conjecture. Moreover, some of the known expander-based counterexamples to the original Baum-Connes conjecture become confirming examples for our reformulated conjecture.
In this paper we study the asymptotic distribution of the moments of (non-normalized) traces $\Tr (w_1), \Tr(w_2), ..., \Tr(w_r)$, where $ w_1, w_2, >..., w_r$ are reduced words in unitaries in the group $\cU(N)$. We prove that as $N\to \infty$ these variables are distributed as normal gaussian variables $\sqrt {j_1} Z_1, ..., \sqrt{Z_r}$, where $j_1, ..., j_r$ are the number of cyclic rotations of the words $w_1, ..., w_s$ leaving them invariant. This extends a previous result by Diaconis (\cite{Diac}), where this it was proved, that $\Tr(U), \Tr(U^2), ...,$ $\Tr(U^p)$ are asymptotically dist…
We study the validity of the Blackadar-Kirchberg conjecture for extensions of separable, nuclear, quasidiagonal $C^*$-algebras that satisfy the UCT. More specifically, we show that the conjecture for the extension has an affirmative answer if the ideal lies in a class of $C^*$-algebras that is closed under local approximations and contains all separable ASH algebras, as well as certain classes of simple, unital $C^*$-algebras and crossed products of unital $C^*$-algebras with the integers.
Let A be a simple, unital, exact, and finite C*-algebra which absorbs the Jiang-Su algebra Z tensorially. We prove that the Cuntz semigroup of A admits a complete order embedding into an ordered semigroup obtained from the Elliott invariant in a functorial manner. We conjecture that this embedding is an isomorphism, and prove the conjecture in several cases. In these same cases -- Z-stable algebras all -- we prove that the Elliott conjecture in its strongest form is equivalent to a conjecture which appears much weaker. Outside the class of Z-stable algebras, this weaker conjecture has no known…
Let $G$ be a locally compact group with cocompact connected component. We prove that the assembly map from the topological $\k$-theory of $G$ to the $\k$-theory of the reduced $C^*$-algebra of $G$ is an isomorphism.
We show that Connes' embedding problem for II_1-factors is equivalent to a statement about distributions of sums of self-adjoint operators with matrix coefficients. This is an application of a linearization result for finite von Neumann algebras, which is proved using asymptotic second order freeness of Gaussian random matrices.
This paper gives a proof of the Baum-Connes conjecture with coefficients for hyperbolic groups. More precisely the injectivity of the Baum-Connes map was established by Kasparov and Skandalis and we prove the surjectivity.
A II_1 factor embeds into the ultraproduct of the hyperfinite II_1 factor if and only if it satisfies the W*-analogue of Lance's weak expectation property. This note gives a self contained proof of this fact.
We define and compare two bivariant generalizations of the topological $K$-group $K^\top(G)$ for a topological group $G$. We consider the Baum-Connes conjecture in this context and study its relation to the usual Baum-Connes conjecture.
The Connes Embedding Problem (CEP) asks whether every separable II_1 factor embeds into an ultrapower of the hyperfinite II_1 factor. We show that the CEP is equivalent to the computability of the universal theory of every type II_1 von Neumann algebra. We also derive some further computability-theoretic consequences of the CEP.
We associate a non-commutative $C^*$-algebra with any locally finite simplicial complex. We determine the $K$-theory of these algebras and show that they can be used to obtain a conceptual explanation for the Baum-Connes conjecture.
We establish the Hasse principle (local-global principle) in the context of the Baum-Connes conjecture with coefficients. We illustrate this principle with the discrete group $GL(2,F)$ where $F$ is any global field.
We give a modification of I. Klep and M. Schweighofer algebraic reformulation of Connes' embedding problem by considering *-algebra of the countably generated free group. This allows to consider only quadratic polynomials in unitary generators instead of arbitrary polynomials in self-adjoint generators.
We establish a reformulation of the Connes embedding problem in terms of an asymptotic property of factorizable completely positive maps. We also prove that the Holevo-Werner channels W_n^- are factorizable, for all odd integers n different from 3. Furthermore, we investigate factorizability of convex combinations of W_3^+ and W_3^-, a family of channels studied by Mendl and Wolf, and discuss asymptotic properties for these channels.
The report below describes the applications of Banach KK-theory to a conjecture of P. Baum and A. Connes about the K-theory of group $C^*$-algebras, and a new proof of the classification by Harish-Chandra, the construction by Parthasarathy and the exhaustion by Atiyah and Schmid of the discrete series representations of connected semi-simple Lie groups.
Given a (not necessarily discrete) proper metric space $M$ with bounded geometry, we define a groupoid $G(M)$. We show that the coarse Baum--Connes conjecture with coefficients, which states that the assembly map with coefficients for G(M) is an isomorphism, is hereditary by taking closed subspaces.
We introduce a new method for studying the Baum-Connes conjecture, which we call the direct splitting method. The method can simplify and clarify proofs of some of the known cases of the conjecture. In a separate paper, with J. Brodzki, E. Guentner and N. Higson, a similar idea will be used to give a finite-dimensional proof of the Baum-Connes conjecture for groups which act properly and co-compactly on a finite-dimensional CAT(0)-cubical space.
We consider quantum XOR games, defined in [11], from the perspective of unitary correlations defined in [7]. We show that Connes' embedding problem has a positive answer if and only if every quantum XOR game has entanglement bias equal to the commuting bias. In particular, the embedding problem is equivalent to determining whether every quantum XOR game $G$ with a winning strategy in the commuting model also has a winning strategy in the approximate finite-dimensional model.
We show that Connes' embedding problem is equivalent to the weak Tsirelson problem in the setting of two-outcome synchronous correlation sets. We further show that the extreme points of two-outcome synchronous correlation sets can be realized using a certain class of universal C*-algebras. We examine these algebras in the three-experiment case and verify that the strong and weak Tsirelson problems have affirmative answers in that setting.
An Explicit Polynomial Counterexample to Connes' Embedding Conjecture
State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Sciences, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
For a compact quantum group $\mathbb G$ of Kac type, we study the existence of a Haar trace-preserving embedding of the von Neumann algebra $L^\infty(\mathbb G)$ into an ultrapower of the hyperfinite II$_1$-factor (the Connes embedding property for $L^\infty(\mathbb G)$). We establish a connection between the Connes embedding property for $L^\infty(\mathbb G)$ and the structure of certain quantum subgroups of $\mathbb G$, and use this to prove that the II$_1$-factors $L^\infty(O_N^+)$ and $L^\infty(U_N^+)$ associated to the free orthogonal and free unitary quantum groups have the Connes embedd…
