Operators induced by graphs (Q1927638)

Let \(\mathbb{G}\) be the graph groupoid induced by the directed graph \(G\) and let \((H_G,L)\) be a fixed canonical representation of \(\mathbb{G}\), where \(H_G\) is the graph Hilbert space \(l_2(\mathbb{G})\). The corresponding von Neumann algebra \(M_G = {\overline{\mathbb{C}[L(\mathbb{G})]}}^w\) is called the graph von Neumann algebra of \(G\). If \(T \in M_G\), then \(T = \sum_{w\in\mathbb{G}} t_wL_w\) with \(t_w \in \mathbb{C}\). The support of \(T\) is defined to be the set \(Supp(T) = \{w \in \mathbb{G} : t_w \neq 0\}\). If the support of \(T\) is a finite subset of \(\mathbb{G}\), then \(T\) is called a graph operator. For such an operator \(T\) the quantities \(t_w\), with \(w \in Supp(T)\), are called the coefficients of \(T\). The authors investigate the self-adjointness, the unitary property, hyponormality, and normality of graph operators in \(M_G\). These properties are characterized by the combinatorial property of the given graph and certain analytic data of coefficients of \(T\). As an application they study the finitely supported operators in the free group factor \(L(F_N)\), generated by the free group \(F_N\) with \(N\) generators.