Strength of convergence in duals of \(C^*\)-algebras and nilpotent Lie groups (Q5937631)

This paper studies the notion of upper multiplicity for irreducible representations of C*-algebras. In particular, it relates the upper multiplicity of an irreducible representation \(\pi \) of (the C*-algebra \( C^{\ast }\left( G\right) \) of) a connected and simply connected nilpotent Lie group \(G\) to the strength of convergence for sequences of irreducible representations converging to \(\pi \). Recall that each pair of an irreducible *-representation \(\pi \in \hat{A}\) of a C*-algebra \(A\) and a unit vector \(\xi \) in the representation space \(H_{\pi }\) of \(\pi \) determines a pure state \(\phi _{\pi ,\xi }:a\in A\mapsto \left\langle \pi \left( a\right) \xi ,\xi \right\rangle \) of \(A\), and that the upper multiplicity \(M_{U}\left( \pi \right) \) of \(\pi \in \hat{A}\) is the maximal number \(n\) for which there is a net \(\left( \pi _{\alpha }\right) _{\alpha }\) in \(\hat{A}\) with orthonormal vectors \(\xi _{1,\alpha },...,\xi _{n,\alpha }\in H_{\pi _{\alpha }}\) such that the net \(\left\{ \phi _{i,\alpha }\right\} _{\alpha }\), for each \(i\), of pure states converges to \(\phi \), where \(\phi :=\phi _{\pi ,\xi }\) for some fixed unit vector \(\xi \in H_{\pi } \) and \(\phi _{i,\alpha }:=\phi _{\pi _{\alpha },\xi _{i,\alpha }}\). For a connected and simply connected nilpotent Lie group \(G\), the well-known Kirillov's orbit method establishes a homeomorphism between the coadjoint orbit space \(\mathfrak{g}^{\ast }/\text{Ad}^{\ast }\left( G\right) \) and the space \(\hat{G}\) of irreducible unitary representations of \(G\), and for \(\pi \in \hat{G}\), it is known that \(M_{U}\left( \pi \right) <\infty \) if and only if the orbit \(\Omega _{\pi }\) associated with \(\pi \) has the maximal dimension. Two sequences \(\left( \xi _{k}\right) _{k}\) and \(\left( \eta _{k}\right) _{k}\) in \(\mathfrak{g}^{\ast }\) are called disjoint if for any relatively compact \(B\subset G\), \(\eta \;_{k}\notin \text{Ad}^{\ast }\left( B\right) \xi _{k}\) for almost all \(k\). Let us consider only representations \(\pi \in \hat{G}\) with orbit \(\Omega _{\pi }\) of the maximal dimension. For a sequence \(\left( \pi _{k}\right) _{k}\) properly converging to \(\pi \), we say that \(\left( \pi _{k}\right) _{k}\) converges to \(\pi \) with strength \(m \) if for any subsequence \(\left( \pi _{k}'\right) _{k}\) of \(\left( \pi _{k}\right) _{k}\) and (any) fixed \(\xi \in \Omega _{\pi }\), any maximal set of pairwise disjoint sequences \(\left( \xi _{k}\right) _{k}\) converging to \(\xi \) and satisfying \(\xi _{k}\in \Omega _{\pi _{k}'}\) for all \( k\) has exactly \(m\) elements. The authors proved that for \(\pi \) with maximal orbit dimension, the upper multiplicity \(M_{U}\left( \pi \right) \) is the greatest strength with which a sequence in \(\hat{G}\) can converge to \(\pi \). Furthermore they computed the upper multiplicity of representations for the class of ``threadlike'' nilpotent Lie groups.