Infinitesimal non-crossing cumulants and free probability of type B

Free probabilistic considerations of type B first appeared in the paper of Biane, Goodman and Nica P. Biane, F. Goodman, A. Nica, Non-crossing cumulants of type B, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 355 (2003) 2263-2303]. Recently, connections between type B and infinitesimal free probability were put into evidence by Belinschi and Shlyakhtenko S.T. Belinschi, D. Shlyakhtenko, Free probability of type B: Analytic aspects and applications, preprint, 2009, available online at www.arxiv.org under reference arXiv:0903.2721]. The interplay between “type B” and “infinitesimal” is also the object of the present paper. We study infinitesimal freeness for a family of unital subalgebras A₁,…,Ak in an infinitesimal noncommutative probability space (A,φ,φ^′) and we introduce a concept of infinitesimal non-crossing cumulant functionals for (A,φ,φ^′), obtained by taking a formal derivative in the formula for usual non-crossing cumulants. We prove that the infinitesimal freeness of A₁,…,Ak is equivalent to a vanishing condition for mixed cumulants; this gives the infinitesimal counterpart for a theorem of Speicher from “usual” free probability. We show that the lattices NC(B)(n) of non-crossing partitions of type B appear in the combinatorial study of (A,φ,φ^′), in the formulas for infinitesimal cumulants and when describing alternating products of infinitesimally free random variables. As an application of alternating free products, we observe the infinitesimal analogue for the well-known fact that freeness is preserved under compression with a free projection. As another application, we observe the infinitesimal analogue for a well-known procedure used to construct free families of free Poisson elements. Finally, we discuss situations when the freeness of A₁,…,Ak in (A,φ) can be naturally upgraded to infinitesimal freeness in (A,φ,φ^′), for a suitable choice of a “companion functional” .