Étale categories, restriction semigroups, and their operator algebras (Q6181150)

Any étale groupoid gives rise to an action of an inverse semigroup on a topological space by partial homeomorphisms, and it may be recovered from this action as a transformation groupoid. This link between étale groupoids and inverse semigroup actions is particularly useful to study the groupoid C*-algebras and, more generally, section C*-algebras of Fell bundles over étale groupoids. Namely, the reduced and full section C*-algebras of such Fell bundles may be identified with related section C*-algebras of appropriate inverse semigroup Fell bundles. This article establishes an analogous relationship between étale categories and actions of restriction semigroups on topological spaces. An étale category still has a convolution algebra, but it lacks an involution because the latter would need inverses in the underlying category. The main result of the article (Theorem~3.19) identifies two Banach algebras associated to an étale action of a restriction semigroup on a second countable, Hausdorff, locally compact space~\(X\). The first Banach algebra is defined by building an étale category and then taking a convolution algebra of functions on the latter. The second Banach algebra is a semicrossed product for the induced action of the restriction semigroup on the \(C_0\)-functions on~\(X\). There is also a reduced variant of the isomorphism. An ``operator algebra'' is often defined as an algebra with a family of norms on all matrix algebras over it, satisfying some axioms so that it has a completely isometric representation as operators on a Hilbert space. In this article, ``operator algebra'' is interpreted as a concrete Banach subalgebra of the C*-algebra of bounded operators on a Hilbert space, disregarding the norms on matrix algebras. The reviewer believes that the isometric isomorphisms proven in the article may easily be improved to complete isometries because the matrix algebras over the relevant Banach algebras lift to the level of étale categories by simply taking the product with a pair groupoid.