Cartan subalgebras of amalgamated free product II$_1$ factors

TL;DR

This paper investigates the uniqueness and non-existence of Cartan subalgebras in amalgamated free product II$_1$ factors, establishing conditions under which such subalgebras are unique or do not exist.

Contribution

It proves the uniqueness of Cartan subalgebras for a broad class of amalgamated free product groups and equivalence relations, and shows non-existence in free products of II$_1$ factors.

Findings

Unique Cartan subalgebra for certain free ergodic actions

Unique Cartan subalgebra for free products of non-hyperfinite equivalence relations

No Cartan subalgebra exists in free products of II$_1$ factors

Abstract

We study Cartan subalgebras in the context of amalgamated free product II$_1$ factors and obtain several uniqueness and non-existence results. We prove that if $\Gamma$ belongs to a large class of amalgamated free product groups (which contains the free product of any two infinite groups) then any II$_1$ factor $L^{\infty}(X)\rtimes\Gamma$ arising from a free ergodic probability measure preserving action of $\Gamma$ has a unique Cartan subalgebra, up to unitary conjugacy. We also prove that if $\mathcal R=\mathcal R_1*\mathcal R_2$ is the free product of any two non-hyperfinite countable ergodic probability measure preserving equivalence relations, then the II$_1$ factor $L(\mathcal R)$ has a unique Cartan subalgebra, up to unitary conjugacy. Finally, we show that the free product $M=M_1*M_2$ of any two II$_1$ factors does not have a Cartan subalgebra. More generally, we prove that if $A\subset M$ is a diffuse amenable von Neumann subalgebra and $P\subset M$ denotes the algebra generated by its normalizer, then either $P$ is amenable, or a corner of $P$ embeds into $M_1$ or $M_2$.