Liberation of orthogonal Lie groups (Q734909)

This paper pursues the study of the concept of `liberation' of quantum groups, introduced by the first author and others. The authors show that liberation, in the framework of compact orthogonal quantum groups, and under a suitable technical assumption called `easiness', yields a one to one correspondence between classical groups and quantum groups. They classify the groups and show that there are 6 of them. The notion of liberation for quantum groups is inspired by Voiculescu's free probability theory: it is an operation that turns a classical compact group into a compact quantum group in such a way that the distribution of the fundamental character is turned into its image under the Bercovici-Pata bijection. Besides it extends the parallels between free and classical probability to the level of combinatorics, via suitable bases of the Tannaka-krein dual, and via asymptotic (free) independence results.