Universal star products (Q1024853)

The authors introduce the notion of universal deformation quantization on a Poisson manifold. It is now well-known that Kontsevich obtained the existence of star-products on any Poisson manifold as a special case of his formality theorem. A more direct construction was given by Cattaneo-Felder-Tommassini, starting with a torsion free linear connection and using Kontsevich's formality on \(\mathbb R^d\). More recently, Dolgushev gave a construction for a Kontsevich formality quasi-isomorphism on a general smooth manifold, using arguments of Cattaneo's construction. In this paper, the authors define the notion of universal star-products. They show how either Cattaneo's method or Dolgushev's globalization of the formality lead to the existence of universal deformation quantizations. Then, the authors compute the appropriate cohomology and prove the unicity of the universal star-products at order 3 in the deformation parameter.