Tensor Products of C*-Algebras Over Abelian Subalgebras

Suppose that A is a C*-algebra and C is a unital abelian C*-subalgebrawhich is isomorphic to a unital subalgebra of the centre ofM(A), the multiplier algebra of A. Letting = , so that we maywrite C = C(), we call A a C()-algebra (following Blanchard7]). Suppose that B is another C()-algebra, then we form A_CB, the algebraic tensor product of A with B over C as follows:A B is the algebraic tensor product over C, I_C = {ⁿ_i–1(f_i 1–1f_i)x|f_iC, xAB} is the ideal in AB generated by f1–1f|fC,and A _CB = AB/I_C. Then A_CB is an involutive algebra over C,and we shall be interested in deciding when A_CB is a pre-C*-algebra;that is, when is there a C*-norm on A_C B? There is a C*-semi-norm,which we denote by ||·||_C-min, which is minimal in thesense that it is dominated by any semi-norm whose kernel containsthe kernel of ||·||_C-min. Moreover, if A _C B has a C*-norm,then ||·||_C-min is a C*-norm on A_C B. The problem isto decide when ||·||_C-min is a norm. It was shown byBlanchard 7, Proposition 3.1] that when A and B are continuousfields and C is separable, then ||·||_C-min is a norm.In this paper we show that ||·||_C-min is a norm whenC is a von Neumann algebra, and then we examine some consequences.