Spectral invariance of smooth crossed products, and rapid decay locally compact groups

We show that all rapid-decay locally compact groups are unimodular and that the set of rapid-decay functions on a locally compact rapidly decaying group forms a dense and spectral invariant Fréchet *-subalgebra of the reduced group C ^*-algebra. In general, the set of rapid-decay functions on a locally compact strongly rapid-decay group with values in a commutative C ^*-algebra forms a dense and spectral invariant Fréchet *-subalgebra of the twisted crossed product C ^*-algebra. The spectral invariance property implies that the K-theories of both algebras are naturally isomorphic under inclusion.This project is supported in part by the National Science Foundation Grant #DMS 92-04005.