14.01.2026, 14:00 - 15:15
– Campus Golm, Building 9, Room 2.22 and via Zoom
Institutskolloquium
Getting to the chore of things
Christian Mercat (Claude Bernard University Lyon 1)
Jakub Curda (University of Oxford)
This talk is motivated by C*-superrigidity - the question of whether a group can be recovered from its group C*-algebra. Since every torsion free abelian group is isomorphic to the group of path components of the unitary group of its C*-algebra, it follows that every such group is C*-superrigid. In order to apply the same idea to the class of torsion free virtually abelian groups, one needs to understand the Cartan subalgebras of the group C*-algebra. I will explain how Cartan subalgebras appear, and provide examples of groups where we can completely understand them.