The Šilov boundary for operator spaces (Q1956198)

The author revisits an older result concerning the existence of the Šilov ideal motivated by the recent interest in the examination of unital completely positive maps and their effects in \(C^{*}\)-theory. After a brief on operator spaces, operator systems and \(C^{*}\)-envelopes, he explains how the existence of \(C^{*}\)-envelope was proved by \textit{W. Arveson} [``Notes on the unique extension property'' (2003), \url{http://math.berkeley.edu/~arverson/Dvi/unExt.pdf}] in a particular case. The general case was proved firstly by \textit{M. Hamana} [Publ. Res. Inst. Math. Sci. 15, 773--785 (1979; Zbl 0436.46046)] and, independently, many years later by \textit{M. A. Dritschel} and \textit{S. A. McCullough} [J. Oper. Theory 53, No 1, 159--167 (2005; Zbl 1119.47311)], which implies the existence of the Šilov ideal. Among the main results of the paper under review, the author gives a direct proof of Hamana's theorem for the existence of an injective envelope, and a new proof of the existence of the Šilov ideal which is independent of the one given by \textit{W. Arveson} [loc.\,cit.]: if \(X\subseteq C=C^{*}(X)\) is an operator space, then the Šilov ideal exists and \(C/I\) is the \(C^{*}\)-envelope of \(X\). This gives additional information on the Šilov ideal as the intersection of \(C^{*}(X)\) with any maximal boundary operator subsystem in \(B(H)\). In particular, this yields a characterization of the Šilov ideals in terms of maximal boundary subsystems and/or kernels of minimal \(X\)-maps.