On certain decompositional properties of von Neumann algebras

It is well known that if α and β are commuting *-automorphisms of a von Neumann algebra M satisfying the equation α + α-1 = β + β-1 then M can be decomposed into a direct sum of subalgebras Mp and M(l − p) by a central projection p in M such that α = β on Mp and α = β-1 on M(1 − p) (see, for instance, [6], [7], [2]). Originally this equation arose in the Tomita-Takesaki theory (see, for example, [11]) in the form of one-parameter modular automorphism groups and later on it has been studied for arbitrary automorphisms and one-parameter groups of automorphisms on von Neumann algebras [7], [8], [9]. In the case of automorphism groups satisfying the above equation, one has a similar decomposition but this time without assuming the commutativity condition (cf. [7], [8]). For another relevant work on one-parameter groups of automorphisms which is close to our papers [7] and [8], we refer to Ciorănescu and Zsidó [1]. Regarding applications, this equation has been used for arbitrary automorphisms in the geometric interpretation of the Tomita-Takesaki theory [2] and in the case of automorphism groups it has been a fundamental tool in the generalization of the Tomita-Takesaki theory to Jordan algebras [3]. We may remark that the decomposition in the commuting case [6], [7] is much simpler than in the case of automorphism groups in the non-commutative situation [8]. In some cases one can obtain the decomposition for an arbitrary pair of automorphisms without assuming their commutativity but the problem in the general case has been unresolved. Recently we have shown that if α and β are *-automorphisms of a von Neumann algebra M satisfying the equation α + α-1 = β + β-1 (without assuming the commutativity of α and β) then there exists a central projection p in M such that α2= β2 on Mp and α2 = β−2 on M(l − p) [10].