KU Leuven

Roe algebras were introduced in the late 1990's in the study of indices of elliptic operators on (locally compact) Riemannian manifolds. Roe was particularly interested in coarse equivalences of metric spaces, which is a weaker notion than that of quasi-isometry. In fact, soon thereafter it was realized that the isomorphism class of these class of C*-algebras did not depend on the coarse equivalence class of the manifold. The converse, that is, whether this class is a complete invariant, became known as the 'Rigidity Problem for Roe algebras'. In this talk we will discuss an affirmative answer to this question, and how to approach its proof. This is based on joint work with Federico Vigolo.

A landmark result in the study of locally compact, abelian groups is the Pontryagin duality. In simple terms, it says that for a given locally compact, abelian group G, one can uniquely associate another locally compact, abelian group called the Pontryagin dual of G. In the realm of C*-algebras, whenever such an abelian group G acts on a C*-algebra A, there is a canonical action of the dual group of G on the crossed product of A by G. In particular, it is natural to ask to what extent one can relate properties of the given G-action to those of the dual action. 

In this talk, I will first introduce a property for actions of locally compact abelian groups called the abelian Rokhlin property and then state a duality type result for this property. While the abelian Rokhlin property is in general weaker than the known Rokhlin property, these two properties coincide in the case of the acting group being the real numbers. Using the duality result mentioned above, I will give new examples of continuous actions of the real numbers which satisfy the Rokhlin property. Part of this talk is based on joint work with Johannes Christensen and Gábor Szabó.

Kasparov's bivariant K-theory (or KK-theory) is an extremely powerful invariant for both C*-algebras and C*-dynamical systems, which was originally motivated for a tool to solve classical problems coming from topology and geometry. Its paramount importance for classification theory was discovered soon after, impressively demonstrated within the Kirchberg-Phillips theorem to classify simple nuclear and purely infinite C*-algebras. Since then, it can be said that every methodological novelty about extracting information from KK-theory brought along some new breakthrough in classification theory. Perhaps the most important example of this is the Lin-Dadarlat-Eilers stable uniqueness theorem, which forms the technical basis behind many of the most important articles written over the past decade. In the recent landmark paper of Carrion et al, it was demonstrated how the stable uniqueness theorem can be upgraded to a uniqueness theorem of sorts under extra assumptions. It was then posed as an open problem whether the statement of a desired "KK-uniqueness theorem" always holds.

In this talk I want to present the affirmative answer to this question: If A and B are separable C*-algebras and (f,g) is a Cuntz pair of absorbing representations whose induced class in KK(A,B) vanishes, then f and g are strongly asymptotically unitarily equivalent. The talk shall focus on the main conceptual ideas towards this theorem, and I plan to discuss variants of the theorem if time permits. It turns out that the analogous KK-uniqueness theorem is true in a much more general context, which covers equivariant and/or ideal-related and/or nuclear KK-theory.

A countable group G is said to be W*-superrigid if G can be entirely recovered from its ambient group von Neumann algebra L(G). I will present a series of joint works with Milan Donvil in which we establish new degrees of W*-superrigidity: isomorphisms may be replaced by virtual isomorphisms expressed by finite index bimodules, the group von Neumann algebra may be twisted by a 2-cocycle, the group G might have infinite center, or we may enlarge the category of discrete groups to the broader class of discrete quantum groups.

The reduced twisted C*-algebra A of an étale groupoid G has a canonical abelian subalgebra D: functions on G's unit space. When G has no non-trivial abelian subgroupoids (i.e., G is principal), then D is in fact maximal abelian. Remarkable work by Kumjian shows that the tuple (A,D) allows us to reconstruct the underlying groupoid G and its twist uniquely; this uses that D is not only masa but even what is called a C*-diagonal. In this talk, I show that twisted C*-algebras of non-principal groupoids can also have such C*-diagonal subalgebras, arising from non-trivial abelian subgroupoids, and I will discuss the reconstructed principal twisted groupoid of Kumjian for such pairs of algebras.

The stable uniqueness theorem for KK-theory asserts that a Cuntz-pair of *-homomorphisms between separable C*-algebras gives the zero element in KK if and only if the *-homomorphisms are stably homotopic through a unitary path, in a specific sense. This result, along with its group equivariant analogue, has been crucial in the classification theory of C*-algebras and C*-dynamics. In this talk, I will present a unitary tensor category analogue of the stable uniqueness theorem and explore its application to a duality in tensor category equivariant KK-theory. To make the talk approachable even for those unfamiliar with actions of unitary tensor categories or KK-theory, I will introduce the relevant definitions and concepts, drawing comparisons with the case of group actions. This is joint work with Kan Kitamura and Robert Neagu.

The Zappa–Szép (ZS) product of two groupoids is a generalization of the semi-direct product: instead of encoding one groupoid action by homomorphisms, the ZS product groupoid encodes two (non-homomorphic, but “compatible”) actions of the groupoids on each other. I will show how to construct the ZS product of two twists over such groupoids and give an example using Weyl twists from Cartan pairs arising from Kumjian--Renault theory.

 Based on joint work with Boyu Li, New Mexico State University

A group is called W*-superrigid if its group von Neumann algebra completely remembers the original group. In this talk, I will present a recent joint work with Stefaan Vaes in which we generalize W*-superrigidity for groups in two directions. Firstly, we find a class of groups for which W*-superrigidity holds in the presence of a twist by an arbitrary 2-cocycle: the twisted group von Neumann algebra completely remembers both the original group and the 2-cocycle. Secondly, for the same class of groups, the superrigidity also holds up to virtual isomorphism.