Involutions and representations for reduced quantum algebras

In the context of deformation quantization, there exist various procedures to deal with the quantization of a reduced space Mred. We shall be concerned here mainly with the classical Marsden-Weinstein reduction, assuming that we have a proper action of a Lie group G on a Poisson manifold M, with a moment map J for which zero is a regular value. For the quantization, we follow Bordemann et al. (2000) 6] (with a simplified approach) and build a star product red_? on Mred from a strongly invariant star product ? on M. The new questions which are addressed in this paper concern the existence of natural ^∗-involutions on the reduced quantum algebra and the representation theory for such a reduced ^∗-algebra.We assume that ? is Hermitian and we show that the choice of a formal series of smooth densities on the embedded coisotropic submanifold C=J−1(0), with some equivariance property, defines a ^∗-involution for red_? on the reduced space. Looking into the question whether the corresponding ^∗-involution is the complex conjugation (which is a ^∗-involution in the Marsden-Weinstein context) yields a new notion of quantized modular class.We introduce a left (C^∞(M)?λ?,?)-submodule and a right (C^∞(Mred)?λ?,red_?)-submodule of C^∞(C)?λ?; we define on it a C^∞(Mred)?λ?-valued inner product and we establish that this gives a strong Morita equivalence bimodule between C^∞(Mred)?λ? and the finite rank operators on . The crucial point is here to show the complete positivity of the inner product. We obtain a Rieffel induction functor from the strongly non-degenerate ^∗-representations of (C^∞(Mred)?λ?,red_?) on pre-Hilbert right D-modules to those of (C^∞(M)?λ?,?), for any auxiliary coefficient ^∗-algebra D over C?λ?.