Trace spaces of counterexamples to Naimark's Problem

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structure of counterexamples to Naimark's problem, showing that their trace spaces can be as complex as any metrizable Choquet simplex, including nonseparable cases, under the diamond principle.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the trace space of such counterexamples can be arbitrarily complex, extending previous constructions to include nonseparable cases.

Findings

Trace spaces can be affinely homeomorphic to any metrizable Choquet simplex.

Counterexamples to Naimark's problem can have nonseparable trace spaces.

The construction relies on the diamond principle to adapt Akemann-Weaver's method.

Abstract

A counterexample to Naimark's problem is a $C^\ast$-algebra that is not isomorphic to the algebra of compact operators on some Hilbert space, yet still has only one irreducible representation up to unitary equivalence. It is well-known that such algebras must be nonseparable, and in 2004 Akemann and Weaver used the diamond principle (a set theoretic axiom independent from ZFC) to give the first counterexamples. For any such counterexample $A$, the unitary group $U(A)$ acts transitively on the pure states, which are the extreme points of the state space $S(A)$. It is conceivable that this implies (as happens for finite-dimensional simplexes) that the action of $U(A)$ on $S(A)$ has at most one fixed point, i.e. $A$ has at most one trace. We give a strong negative answer here assuming diamond. In particular, we adapt the Akemann-Weaver construction to show that the trace space of a counterexample to Naimark's problem can be affinely homeomorphic to any metrizable Choquet simplex, and can also be nonseparable.