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Uniform property $ \Gamma $ and finite dimensional tracial boundaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2025

Samuel Evington
Affiliation:
Mathematical Institute, University of Münster, Einsteinstrasse 62, 48149 Münster, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
Christopher Schafhauser*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1400 R St., Lincoln, NE 68588, USA
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Abstract

We prove that a C$^*$-algebra A has uniform property $\Gamma $ if the set of extremal tracial states, $\partial _e T(A)$, is a non-empty compact space of finite covering dimension and for each $\tau \in \partial _e T(A)$, the von Neumann algebra $\pi _\tau (A)"$ arising from the GNS representation has property $\Gamma $.

Type
Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Canadian Mathematical Society

1 Introduction

There is a rich interaction between C $^*$ -algebras and their enveloping von Neumann algebras—see Brown’s survey [Reference Brown4], for example. More recently, this interaction has been used to great success in C $^*$ -algebra theory, using Connes’ fundamental result on the uniqueness of the separably acting injective II $_1$ factor [Reference Connes10] to deduce structural theorems about simple nuclear C $^*$ -algebras. For instance, even specializing to C $^*$ -algebras with unique trace, this idea played a crucial role in the solution to the Toms–Winter conjecture for C $^*$ -algebras with unique trace [Reference Matui and Sato18, Reference Matui and Sato19, Reference Sato, White and Winter23, Reference Winter27], the quasidiagonality theorem [Reference Tikuisis, White and Winter25], and the AF embedding theorem [Reference Schafhauser24].

The condition of interest in this article is Murray and von Neumann’s property $\Gamma $ [Reference Murray and von Neumann20], which they used to show the hyperfinite II $_1$ factor is not isomorphic to a free group factor, giving the first example of non-isomorphic II $_1$ factors, by showing property $\Gamma $ holds for the former and fails for the latter. For our purposes, the most useful characterization of property $\Gamma $ for a II $_1$ factor is the existence of an approximately central projection of trace 1/2, which is due to Dixmier [Reference Dixmier12].

For a C $^*$ -algebra A, let $T(A)$ denote the set of tracial states on A, which we will always assume is non-empty and weak $^*$ -compact (the later holds, for example, if A is unital), and let $\partial _e T(A)$ denote the extreme points of $T(A)$ . For each $\tau \in T(A)$ , there is an $L^2$ -seminorm $\|a\|_{2,\tau } = \tau (a^*a)^{1/2}$ and the Gelfand–Naimark–Segal (GNS) representation $\pi _\tau :A \rightarrow \mathcal {B}(L^2(A,\tau ))$ .

The associated tracial von Neumann algebra $\pi _\tau (A)"$ is a factor if and only if $\tau \in \partial _e T(A)$ , and, in this case, $\pi _\tau (A)"$ has property $\Gamma $ if and only if for every finite set $\mathcal F \subseteq A$ and $\epsilon> 0$ , there is a positive contraction $p \in A$ with

(1.1) $$ \begin{align} |\tau(p) - 1/2| < \epsilon,\quad \|p - p^2\|_{2,\tau} < \epsilon,\quad \text{and}\quad \max_{a \in \mathcal F} \|[a, p]\|_{2,\tau} < \epsilon. \end{align} $$

When A has several traces, a natural version of property $\Gamma $ , which could be called fibrewise property $\Gamma $ , would be asking that $\pi _\tau (A)"$ has property $\Gamma $ for every $\tau \in \partial _e T(A)$ . However, the more useful condition is uniform property $\Gamma $ , introduced in [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis, White and Winter9], which requires that p in (1.1) can be chosen uniformly over all traces $\tau \in \partial _e T(A)$ .Footnote 1

In [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis, White and Winter9], uniform property $\Gamma $ was shown to hold for all $\mathscr {Z}$ -stable C $^*$ -algebras A, i.e., when $A \cong A \otimes \mathscr {Z}$ , where $\mathscr {Z}$ denotes the Jiang–Su algebra [Reference Jiang and Su15]. This observation had a crucial role in proof that simple nuclear finite $\mathscr {Z}$ -stable C $^*$ -algebras have nuclear dimension at most one [Reference Castillejos and Evington6, Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis, White and Winter9].Footnote 2 Furthermore, building on work of Matui and Sato [Reference Matui and Sato18], it was shown in [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White8] that separable simple nuclear C $^*$ -algebras with uniform property $\Gamma $ and strict comparison are $\mathscr {Z}$ -stable.

Any simple nuclear non-elementary C $^*$ -algebra has fibrewise property $\Gamma $ because injective II $_1$ factors have property $\Gamma $ by Connes’ theorem [Reference Connes10]. Hence, due to the results of [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White8], the problem of whether fibrewise property $\Gamma $ implies uniform property $\Gamma $ is of significant interest. In the setting when A is nuclear and $\partial _e T(A)$ is compact with finite covering dimension, this is true by the results of [Reference Kirchberg and Rørdam16, Reference Sato22, Reference Toms, White and Winter26]. The main result of this article removes the nuclearity constraint.

Theorem 1.1 Let A be a $C^*$ -algebras with $T(A)$ compact and non-empty. Suppose $\partial _e T(A)$ is compact and has finite covering dimension. Then A has uniform property $\Gamma $ if and only if $\pi _\tau (A)"$ has property $\Gamma $ for all $\tau \in \partial _e T(A)$ .

If property $\Gamma $ is replaced with McDuff’s property (the existence of a unital approximately central approximate embedding of the $2 \times 2$ matrix algebra $M_2$ ) in both the fibrewise and uniform conditions, the theorem holds by [Reference Kirchberg and Rørdam16, Proposition 7.7] and also essentially follows from the results obtained independently and contemporaneously in [Reference Sato22, Reference Toms, White and Winter26].

Our proof of Theorem 1.1 is modeled on the argument in the McDuff setting carried out in [Reference Toms, White and Winter26, Section 4]. Let $A^\infty \cap A'$ denote the tracial central sequence algebra of A (see Section 2.2). Then the uniform McDuff property for A (in the separable setting) is equivalent to the existence of a unital embedding $M_k \rightarrow A^\infty \cap A'$ for some, or equivalently any, integer $k \geq 2$ . Property $\Gamma $ is analogously characterized by the existence of unital embeddings $\mathbb C^k \rightarrow A^\infty \cap A'$ with prescribed tracial behavior. The extra control on the traces is not needed in the McDuff setting due to the uniqueness of the trace on $M_k$ , and explicitly controlling the tracial behavior of the maps throughout the argument is where the new difficulties lie.

It will be technically convenient to prove Theorem 1.1 in the slightly different (and somewhat more general) setting of W $^*$ -bundles, introduced by Ozawa in [Reference Ozawa21]. Since uniform property $\Gamma $ is an approximation property in the uniform 2-seminorm

(1.2) $$ \begin{align} \|a\|_{2, T(A)} = \sup_{\tau \in T(A)} \tau(a^*a)^{1/2}, \qquad a \in A, \end{align} $$

it is natural to replace A with it’s uniform tracial completion $\overline {A}{}^{T(A)}$ , obtained by adding a limit point to every $\|\cdot \|$ -bounded $\|\cdot \|_{2, T(A)}$ -Cauchy sequence in A (and quotienting by $\|\cdot \|_{2, T(A)}$ -null elements). Ozawa showed in [Reference Ozawa21] that $\overline {A}{}^{T(A)}$ always carries the structure of a C $^*$ -algebra—in fact, these form the prototypical examples of tracially complete $C^*$ -algebras, which were recently introduced and studied systematically in [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5].

When A is a C $^*$ -algebra such that $T(A)$ is compact and non-empty and $\partial _e T(A)$ is compact, Ozawa showed in [Reference Ozawa21] that the centre of ${\mathcal {M}} = \overline {A}{}^{T(A)}$ has spectrum $K = \partial _e T(A)$ and the natural inclusion $C(K) \rightarrow {\mathcal {M}}$ admits a faithful tracial conditional expectation $E \colon \mathcal {M} \rightarrow C(K)$ . Further,

(1.3) $$ \begin{align} \|a\|_{2, T(A)} = \|E(a^*a)\|^{1/2}, \qquad a \in A, \end{align} $$

and hence, by the definition of $\mathcal {M} = \overline {A}{}^{T(A)}$ , the unit ball of ${\mathcal {M}}$ is complete in the norm $\|b\|_{2, \mathrm {u}} = \|E(b^*b)\|^{1/2}$ . Axiomatizing this structure of the triple $({\mathcal {M}}, K, E)$ leads to Ozawa’s notion of W $^*$ -bundles (see Section 2.1). Loosely speaking, ${\mathcal {M}}$ can be viewed as the continuous sections of a topological bundle over K with tracial von Neumann algebra fibres. The following is a W $^*$ -bundle analog of Theorem 1.1.

Theorem 1.2 Let $\mathcal {M}$ be a $W^*$ -bundle over a finite dimensional compact Hausdorff space such that every fibre of $\mathcal {M}$ is a II $_1$ factor. Then $\mathcal {M}$ has property $\Gamma $ if and only if every fibre of $\mathcal {M}$ has property $\Gamma $ .

If A is a C $^*$ -algebra as in Theorem 1.1, the corresponding W $^*$ -bundle $\mathcal {M} = \overline {A}{}^{T(A)}$ will satisfy the hypotheses of Theorem 1.2. Then property $\Gamma $ for $\mathcal {M}$ , coming from Theorem 1.2, will imply uniform property $\Gamma $ for A, obtaining Theorem 1.1. After establishing some preliminaries in Section 2, the rest of the article is essentially devoted to proving Theorem 1.2 in Section 3. Theorem 1.1 is deduced from Theorem 1.2 at the end of Section 3.

2 Preliminaries

2.1 W $^*$ -bundles

W $^*$ -bundles will be central to this article. We recall the definition and set out our notational conventions below. Our standard references for W $^*$ -bundles are [Reference Ozawa21] and [Reference Evington14].

Definition 2.1 (cf. [Reference Ozawa21, Section 5])

A $W^*$ -bundle consists of a unital C $^*$ -algebra $\mathcal {M}$ together with a unital embedding of $C(K)$ into the centre of $\mathcal {M}$ and a conditional expectation $E\colon \mathcal {M} \rightarrow C(K)$ such that the following axioms hold:

  1. (i) for any $a,b \in \mathcal {M}$ , we have $E(ab) = E(ba)$ ;

  2. (ii) for any $a \in \mathcal {M}$ , we have $E(a^*a) = 0$ implies $a = 0$ ;

  3. (iii) the unit ball $\{a \in \mathcal {M}: \|a\| \leq 1\}$ is complete with respect to the norm defined by $\|a\|_{2, \mathrm {u}} = \|E(a^*a)\|^{1/2}$ .

We shall denote a W $^*$ -bundle by a triple $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ or simply by $\mathcal {M}$ if K and E are clear from context. Every point $x \in K$ defines a trace $\tau \in T(\mathcal {M})$ by $\tau (a) = E(a)(x)$ for $a \in \mathcal {M}$ . The map $K \rightarrow T(\mathcal {M})$ thus defined is continuous with respect to the weak $^*$ topology on $T(\mathcal {M})$ . It will be convenient to identify points in K with their induced trace.

We write $\pi _\tau \colon \mathcal {M} \rightarrow \mathcal B(L^2(\mathcal {M}, \tau ))$ for the GNS representation of $\mathcal {M}$ with respect to $\tau \in K$ . The image $\pi _\tau (\mathcal {M})$ is called the fibre of $\mathcal {M}$ at $\tau \in K$ . An important consequence of axiom (iii) is that $\pi _\tau (\mathcal {M})" = \pi _\tau (\mathcal {M})$ ; see [Reference Ozawa21, Theorem 11]. The trace $\tau $ induces a faithful normal trace $\bar {\tau }$ on $\pi _\tau (\mathcal {M})$ , so the fibres of a W $^*$ -bundle are tracial von Neumann algebras. A W $^*$ -bundle is said to have factorial fibres if $\pi _\tau (\mathcal {M})$ is a factor for all $\tau \in K$ . This is equivalent to saying that every $\tau \in K$ is an extreme point of $T(\mathcal {M})$ ; see [Reference Dixmier13, Theorem 6.7.3], for example.

Given a C $^*$ -algebra A with $T(A)$ compact and non-empty, the uniform tracial completion of A with respect to $T(A)$ is defined by

(2.1) $$ \begin{align} \overline{A}{}^{T(A)} = \frac{\{(a_n)_{n=1}^\infty \in \ell^\infty(A): (a_n)_{n=1}^\infty \text{ is }\|\cdot\|_{2,T(A)}\text{-Cauchy}\}}{\{(a_n)_{n=1}^\infty \in \ell^\infty(A): (a_n)_{n=1}^\infty \text{ is }\|\cdot\|_{2,T(A)}\text{-null}\}}, \end{align} $$

where $\ell ^\infty (A)$ denotes the C $^*$ -algebra of bounded sequences in A and

(2.2) $$ \begin{align} \|a\|_{2,T(A)} = \sup_{\tau \in T(A)} \|a\|_{2,\tau}, \qquad a \in A. \end{align} $$

Ozawa proved that for such a C $^*$ -algebra, if the set of extreme points of $T(A)$ , denoted $\partial _e T(A)$ , is compact in the weak $^*$ topology, then $\overline {A}{}^{T(A)}$ can be endowed with the structure of a W $^*$ -bundle over $K = \partial _e T(A)$ ; see [Reference Ozawa21, Theorem 3].

W $^*$ -bundles form a special case of the more general framework of tracially complete C $^*$ -algebras recently introduced in [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5]. A tracially complete $C^*$ -algebra is a pair $(\mathcal {M}, X)$ , where $\mathcal {M}$ is a unital C $^*$ -algebra and $X \subseteq T(\mathcal {M})$ is a compact convex set of traces, where the seminorm

(2.3) $$ \begin{align} \|a\|_{2,X} = \sup_{\tau \in X} \|a\|_{2,\tau}, \qquad a \in A, \end{align} $$

is a norm and the unit ball $\{a \in {\mathcal {M}} : \|a\| \leq 1\}$ is $\|\cdot \|_{2,X}$ -complete. More precisely, given a W $^*$ -bundle $({\mathcal {M}}, K, E)$ , let X be the set of all traces of the form

(2.4) $$ \begin{align} \tau_\mu(a) = \int_K E(a) \, d\mu, \qquad a \in {\mathcal{M}}, \end{align} $$

where $\mu $ ranges over the space of Radon probability measures on K. Then $(\mathcal {M}, X)$ is a tracially complete C $^*$ -algebra [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5, Proposition 3.6]. By a theorem essentially due to Ozawa in [Reference Ozawa21], W $^*$ -bundles with factorial fibres are precisely the factorialFootnote 3 tracially complete C $^*$ -algebras $(\mathcal {M}, X)$ where X is a Bauer simplex; this precise statement is given as [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5, Theorem 3.37]. In fact, tracially complete C $^*$ -algebras were introduced to extend the thoery of W $^*$ -bundles beyond the Bauer setting. For example, if A is a unital C $^*$ -algebra such that $T(A)$ is compact and non-empty but $\partial _e T(A)$ is not compact, then $\overline {A}{}^{T(A)}$ does not have a natural W $^*$ -bundle structure but is still a (factorial) tracially complete C $^*$ -algebra.

2.2 Sequence algebras

Ultrapowers of W $^*$ -bundles were introduced in [Reference Bosa, Brown, Sato, Tikuisis, White and Winter3, Section 3]. In this article, it will be more convenient to work with the Fréchet filter on $\mathbb N$ rather than an ultrafilter; i.e., we will work with classical sequential limits instead of ultralimits.

Definition 2.2 Let $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ be a W $^*$ -bundle. Then

(2.5) $$ \begin{align} c_{0, \mathrm{u}}(\mathcal{M}) = \{(a_n)_{n=1}^\infty \in \ell^\infty(\mathcal{M}): \lim_{n\to\infty}\|a_n\|_{2, \mathrm{u}} = 0 \} \end{align} $$

is an ideal of the C $^*$ -algebra $\ell ^\infty (\mathcal {M})$ of $\|\cdot \|$ -bounded sequences in $\mathcal {M}$ , and we define $\mathcal {M}^\infty = \ell ^\infty (\mathcal {M})/c_{0,\mathrm {u}}(\mathcal {M})$ . Since $\|f\|_{2, \mathrm {u}} = \|f\|$ for all $f \in C(K)$ , the norm sequence algebraFootnote 4

(2.6) $$ \begin{align} C(K)^\infty = \frac{\ell^\infty(C(K))}{\{(f_n)_{n=1}^\infty \in \ell^\infty(C(K)): \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} \|f_n\| = 0 \}}. \end{align} $$

unitally embeds into the centre of $\mathcal {M}^\infty $ . There is a conditional expectation $E^\infty \colon \mathcal {M}^\infty \rightarrow C(K)^\infty $ , defined at the level of representative sequences by $(a_n)_{n=1}^\infty \mapsto (E(a_n))_{n=1}^\infty $ . We write $K^\infty $ for the spectrum of the abelian C $^*$ -algebra $C(K)^\infty $ and identify $C(K)^\infty \cong C(K^\infty )$ . The W $^*$ -bundle $(\mathcal {M}^\infty , K^\infty , E^\infty )$ is called the sequence algebra of $\mathcal {M}$ .Footnote 5

It is worth saying a few extra words about the base space $K^\infty $ of the reduced power. For every sequence of points $(x_n)_{n=1}^\infty $ in K and every free ultrafilter $\omega $ on the natural numbers, we can define a character $x_\omega \colon C(K)^\infty \rightarrow \mathbb C$ by $(f_n)_{n=1}^\infty \mapsto \lim _{n\to \omega } f_n(x_n)$ . Hence, $x_\omega \in K^\infty $ . The set of all such characters recovers the norm on $C(K)^\infty $ and so defines a dense subset of $K^\infty $ by a standard application of Urysohn’s lemma. When we view elements of $K^\infty $ as traces on $\mathcal {M}^\infty $ , by identifying $x_\omega $ with $x_\omega \circ E^\infty $ , the characters of the form $x_\omega $ correspond to limit traces in the sense of [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White7, Section 1] (see also [Reference Bosa, Brown, Sato, Tikuisis, White and Winter3, Section 1.3] for an ultrapower version). Hence, we may view $K^\infty $ as a subset of the weak $^*$ -closure of the limit traces on ${\mathcal {M}}^\infty $ .

We end this subsection by reminding the reader of some common notational conventions. We identify $\mathcal {M}$ with the subalgebra of $\mathcal {M}^\infty $ coming from constant sequence in $\ell ^\infty (\mathcal {M})$ and write $\mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ for the relative commutant of a subset $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ .

2.3 Tracial factorization

W $^*$ -bundles with factorial fibres enjoy the following property known as tracial factorization.

Proposition 2.3 Let $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ be a $W^*$ -bundle with factorial fibres. For any finite subset of contractions $\mathcal F \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ and $\epsilon> 0$ , there exist a finite subset of positive contractions $\mathcal G \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ and $\delta> 0$ such that for all $x \in \mathcal {M}$ , if

(2.7) $$ \begin{align} \max_{y \in \mathcal G} \|[x,y]\|_{2, \mathrm{u}} < \delta, \end{align} $$

then

(2.8) $$ \begin{align} \max_{y \in \mathcal F} \|E(xy)-E(x)E(y)\| < \epsilon. \end{align} $$

The fact that W $^*$ -bundles with factorial fibres have tracial factorisation is implicit in [Reference Ozawa21]. Essentially the same phenomenon, in the setting of C $^*$ -algebras with a Bauer simplex of traces, is shown in [Reference Sato22]. Our proof of Proposition 2.3 is modelled on [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White8, Proposition 3.1] with nets replacing sequences.

Proof Proof (Proposition 2.3)

Suppose the result doesn’t hold. Then there exist $\epsilon _0> 0$ , a positive contraction $y_0 \in \mathcal {M}$ , and a net $(x_\lambda )_{\lambda \in \Lambda }$ of positive contractions in $\mathcal {M}$ such that

(2.9) $$ \begin{align} \lim_{\lambda} \|[x_\lambda,y]\|_{2, \mathrm{u}} = 0 \end{align} $$

for all $y \in \mathcal {M}$ , but

(2.10) $$ \begin{align} \|E(x_\lambda y_0)-E(x_\lambda)E(y_0)\| \geq \epsilon_0 \end{align} $$

for all $\lambda \in \Lambda $ . Hence, there exists a net $(\tau _\lambda )_{\lambda \in \Lambda }$ of traces in K such that

(2.11) $$ \begin{align} |\tau_\lambda(x_\lambda y_0)-\tau_\lambda(x_\lambda)\tau_\lambda(y_0)| \geq \epsilon_0 \end{align} $$

for each $\lambda \in \Lambda $ .

Since K is compact, after passing to a subnet, we may assume $(\tau _\lambda )_{\lambda \in \Lambda }$ converges in the weak $^*$ topology to some $\tau \in K$ . Since the unit ball of $\mathcal {M}^*$ is weak $^*$ -compact, by passing to a subnet again, we may further assume that $(y \mapsto \tau _{\lambda }(x_{\lambda } y))_{\lambda \in \Lambda }$ converges in the weak $^*$ topology to some $\sigma \in \mathcal {M}^*$ .

It follows from (2.9) that $\sigma $ is a positive tracial functional on $\mathcal {M}$ . Moreover, for positive $y \in \mathcal {M}$ , we have

(2.12) $$ \begin{align} \sigma(y) &= \lim_{\lambda} \tau_{\lambda}(y^{1/2} x_{\lambda} y^{1/2})\nonumber\\ &\leq \limsup_{\lambda} \tau_{\lambda}(y^{1/2} \|x_{\lambda}\| y^{1/2})\\ &\leq \tau(y)\nonumber \end{align} $$

since $x_\lambda \in \mathcal {M}$ is a positive contraction.

As $\mathcal {M}$ has factorial fibres, $\tau $ is an extremal trace on $\mathcal {M}$ . Since $\sigma \leq \tau $ , it follows that $\sigma = \sigma (1_{\mathcal {M}}) \tau $ . We conclude

(2.13) $$ \begin{align} \lim_{\lambda} \tau_{\lambda}(x_{\lambda} y_0) &= \sigma(y_0)\nonumber\\ &= \sigma(1_{\mathcal{M}}) \tau(y_0)\nonumber\\ &= \lim_{\lambda} \tau_{\lambda}(x_{\lambda})\lim_{\lambda} \tau_{\lambda}(y_0)\\ &= \lim_{\lambda} \tau_{\lambda}(x_{\lambda})\tau_{\lambda}(y_0).\nonumber \end{align} $$

However, this contradicts (2.11).

In this article, we will make judicious use of tracial factorization to expedite our proofs in the following way. We shall show that elements with certain properties exist in all relative commutants $\mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ , where $\mathcal {M}_0$ is any $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subalgebra of a W $^*$ -bundle $\mathcal {M}$ . A reindexing argument will then allow us to show that elements with the same set of properties exists in $\mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ for any $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subalgebra $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ , and moreover, the elements can be chosen such that each element a satisfies $\tau (as) = \tau (a)\tau (s)$ for all $s \in S$ and $\tau \in K^\infty $ .

A formal statement and proof of this fact will be presented in the following lemma. To this end, we introduce some additional terminology: the reindexing $^*$ -homomorphism $\psi _\rho \colon \mathcal {M}^\infty \rightarrow \mathcal {M}^\infty $ associated with a strictly increasing function $\rho \colon \mathbb N \rightarrow \mathbb N$ is the unital $^*$ -homomorphism defined at the level of representative sequences by $(a_n)_{n=1}^\infty \mapsto (a_{\rho (n)})_{n=1}^\infty $ .Footnote 6

Lemma 2.4 Let $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ be a $W^*$ -bundle with factorial fibres. For a $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ , there is a $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subalgebra $\mathcal {M}_0 \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ with the following property: for any $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset $T \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ , there exists a reindexing $^*$ -homomorphism $\psi _\rho \colon \mathcal {M}^\infty \rightarrow \mathcal {M}^\infty $ such that $\psi _\rho (T) \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ and

(2.14) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\psi_\rho(t)s)=\tau(\psi_\rho(t))\tau(s) \end{align} $$

for all $s \in S$ , $t\in T$ , and $\tau \in K^\infty $ .

Proof By continuity and linearity, it suffices to replace S by a countable set of contractions. Let us then enumerate $S=\{s^{(1)},s^{(2)},\dots \}$ and represent $s^{(i)}$ by the sequence of contractions $(s_n^{(i)})_{n=1}^\infty $ in $\mathcal {M}$ . Set $\mathcal F_n = \{s_n^{(i)}: i = 1,\ldots ,n\}$ and $\epsilon _n = \tfrac {1}{n}$ . Let $\mathcal G_n \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ and $\delta _n> 0$ be the finite set and tolerance corresponding to $(\mathcal F_n, \epsilon _n)$ according to Proposition 2.3. We may assume that $\mathcal F_n \subseteq \mathcal G_n$ and $\delta _n < \epsilon _n$ . Take $\mathcal {M}_0$ to be the subalgebra of $\mathcal {M}$ generated by $\bigcup _{n \in \mathbb N} \mathcal G_n$ and note that $\mathcal {M}_0$ is $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable.

Let $T \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ be $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable. By continuity and linearity, it suffices to replace T by a countable set of contractions. Say $T=\{t^{(1)},t^{(2)},\dots \}$ and represent $t^{(j)}$ by the sequence of contractions $(t_m^{(j)})_{m=1}^\infty $ . For each $n \in \mathbb N$ , any sufficiently large $m \in \mathbb N$ will satisfy

(2.15) $$ \begin{align} \max_{y \in \mathcal G_n}\|[t_{m}^{(j)}, y]\|_{2, \mathrm{u}} < \delta_n \end{align} $$

for all $j\in \{1, \ldots , n\}$ because T commutes with $\mathcal {M}_0$ . Hence, we may inductively define a strictly increasing function $\rho \colon \mathbb N \rightarrow \mathbb N$ such that

(2.16) $$ \begin{align} \max_{y \in \mathcal G_n}\|[t_{\rho(n)}^{(j)}, y]\|_{2, \mathrm{u}} < \delta_n \end{align} $$

for all $j\in \{1, \ldots , n\}$ and $n \in \mathbb N$ . By the choice of $\mathcal G_n$ and $\delta _n$ , this implies

(2.17) $$ \begin{align} \sup_{\tau \in K}\big|\tau(t_{\rho(n)}^{(j)}s_{n}^{(i)})-\tau(t_{\rho(n)}^{(j)})\tau(s_{n}^{(i)})\big| &< \frac{1}{n} \end{align} $$

for all $i, j \in \{1, \ldots , n\}$ and $n \in \mathbb N$ . At the level of the sequence algebra $\mathcal {M}^\infty $ , this implies (2.14). Since we have chosen that $\mathcal F_n \subseteq \mathcal G_n$ and $\delta _n < \epsilon _n =\tfrac {1}{n} $ , it follows from (2.16) that $\psi _\rho (T) \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ .

Note that the formulation of Lemma 2.4 simplifies when $\mathcal {M}$ itself is $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable as $\mathcal {M}_0$ can always be taken to be $\mathcal {M}$ .

2.4 Property $\Gamma $

Uniform property $\Gamma $ for C $^*$ -algebras was introduced in [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis, White and Winter9] and further investigated in [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White8].

Definition 2.5 (cf. [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis, White and Winter9, Definition 2.1])

Let A be a C $^*$ -algebra with $T(A)$ non-empty and compact. Then A has uniform property $\Gamma $ if for any separable subset $S \subseteq A$ and $k \in \mathbb N$ , there exist projections $p_1,\ldots ,p_k \in A^\infty \cap S'$ summing to $1_{A^\infty }$ such that

(2.18) $$ \begin{align} \tau(ap_j) = \frac{1}{k}\tau(a) \end{align} $$

for all $a \in S$ , $\tau \in T_\infty (A)$ and $j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ .

Here, the tracial sequence algebra $A^\infty $ is defined analogously to the sequence algebra ${\mathcal {M}}^\infty $ in Definition 2.2, replacing with uniform trace norm $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ on the W $^*$ -bundle $\mathcal {M}$ with the uniform trace seminorm $\|\cdot \|_{2, T(A)}$ as in (2.3). The set $T_\infty (A) \subseteq T(A^\infty )$ is the set of limit traces, defined by on representing sequences by

(2.19) $$ \begin{align} (a_n)_{n=1}^\infty \mapsto \lim_{n \rightarrow \omega} \tau_n(a_n) \end{align} $$

for a sequence of traces $(\tau _n)_{n=1}^\infty \subseteq T(A)$ and a free ultrafilter $\omega $ on $\mathbb N$ .

The definition in [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis, White and Winter9] differs in two ways. When A itself is separable, it suffices to take $S = A$ by a simple reindexing argument. Also, [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis, White and Winter9] works with the ultrapower $A^\omega $ in place of the sequence algebra $A^\infty $ . Both constructions lead to the same notion of property $\Gamma $ ; see the discussion in [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White8, Section 2] for details. Finally, as discussed in [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White8, Section 3], when $T(A)$ is a Bauer simplex it suffices take $a=1_A$ in this definition by tracial factorization. Also, we note that the informal definition of property $\Gamma $ stated in the introduction assumed $k = 2$ . This is the same condition by a slight modification of [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White8, Proposition 2.3].Footnote 7 However, it is important in this article that k can be taken to be arbitrarily large when applying property $\Gamma $ , and when verifying property $\Gamma $ , reducing to the case $k = 2$ will not significantly simplify our proof.

Property $\Gamma $ can also be defined at the level of W $^*$ -bundles with factorial fibres.

Definition 2.6 Let $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ be a W $^*$ -bundle with factorial fibres. We say that $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ has property $\Gamma $ if for any $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ and $k \in \mathbb N$ , there exist projections $p_1,\ldots ,p_k \in \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ summing to $1_{\mathcal {M}^\infty }$ such that

(2.20) $$ \begin{align} \tau(p_j) = \frac{1}{k} \end{align} $$

for all $\tau \in K^\infty $ and $j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ .

By tracial factorization, the $p_j$ can always be chosen such that

(2.21) $$ \begin{align} \tau(ap_j) = \frac{1}{k}\tau(a) \end{align} $$

for all $a \in S$ , $\tau \in K^\infty $ and $j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ . Hence, our definition of property $\Gamma $ for W $^*$ -bundles is consistent with that of [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5, Definition 5.19] for tracially complete C $^*$ -algebras.

Finally, we note that the two notions of property $\Gamma $ above are closely connected, which is what will allow us to deduce Theorem 1.1 from Theorem 1.2. If A is a C $^*$ -algebra with $T(A)$ compact and non-empty and $K = \partial _e T(A)$ compact, then $\mathcal {M}=\overline {A}{}^{T(A)}$ is a W $^*$ -bundle as recalled in Section 2.1, and A has uniform property $\Gamma $ if and only if $\mathcal {M}$ has property $\Gamma $ ; see [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5, Proposition 5.20].

2.5 Order zero maps and their functional calculus

Let A and B be C $^*$ -algebras. A completely positive and contractive (c.p.c.) map $\phi \colon A \rightarrow B$ is said to be order zero if it preserves orthogonality, i.e., if $\phi (x)\phi (y) = 0$ for all $x,y \in A_+$ satisfying $xy = 0$ .

We briefly recall the structure theorem for order zero maps and the order zero functional calculus from [Reference Winter and Zacharias28], which is based on early work from [Reference Wolff29]. Let $\phi \colon A \rightarrow B$ be a c.p.c. order zero map. Then there is positive contraction $h \in M(\mathrm {C}^*(\phi (A))) \cap \phi (A)'$ and a $^*$ -homomorphism $\hat \phi \colon A \rightarrow M(\mathrm {C}^*(\phi (A))) \cap \{h\}'$ such that $\phi (a) = \hat \phi (a)h$ for all $a \in A$ (see [Reference Winter and Zacharias28, Theorem 2.3]). Note that when A is unital, we have $h=\phi (1_A) \in \mathrm {C}^*(\phi (A))$ .

For a positive contraction $f \in C_0(0, 1]$ , define $f(\phi ) \colon A \rightarrow B$ by $f(\phi )(a) = \hat \phi (a) f(h)$ . Since $\hat \phi $ is a $^*$ -homomorphism commuting with h, it is easily seen that $f(\phi )$ is a c.p.c. order zero map. This construction is known as the order zero functional calculus. Furthermore, we can define an induced $^*$ -homomorphism $\tilde \phi \colon C_0(0,1] \otimes A \rightarrow B$ via $f \otimes a \mapsto f(\phi )(a)$ (see [Reference Winter and Zacharias28, Corollary 3.1]). The original c.p.c. order zero map $\phi $ can be recovered from $\tilde \phi $ since $\phi (a) = \tilde \phi (\mathrm {id}_{(0,1]} \otimes a)$ for all $a \in A$ .

The following property of the order zero functional calculus is particularly relevant to the computations in this article. This has been observed before (see [Reference Toms, White and Winter26, (2.1)], for example), but we include a proof for the sake of completeness.

Lemma 2.7 Let A and B be $C^*$ -algebras and $\phi \colon A \rightarrow B$ be a c.p.c. order zero map. Let $p \in A$ be a projection. Then

(2.22) $$ \begin{align} f(\phi)(p) = f(\phi(p)) \end{align} $$

for all positive contractions $f \in C_0(0,1]$ .

Proof By the Stone–Weierstrass theorem, it suffices to consider the functions $f_n(t) = t^n$ for $n \geq 1$ . Let $\tilde \phi \colon C_0(0,1] \otimes A \rightarrow B$ be the induced $^*$ -homomorphism. Then, since $p^n = p$ , we have

(2.23) $$ \begin{align} f_n(\phi(p)) = \tilde\phi(\mathrm{id}_{(0,1]} \otimes p)^n = \tilde\phi(\mathrm{id}_{(0,1]}^n \otimes p) = f_n(\phi)(p). \end{align} $$

We isolate the following lemma from the proof of [Reference Toms, White and Winter26, Lemma 4.5]. We thank Allan Donsig for suggesting the short spatial proof below, which we find more intuitive than the functional calculus approach taken in [Reference Toms, White and Winter26].

Lemma 2.8 Let A and B be $C^*$ -algebras and assume $\phi , \psi \colon A \rightarrow B$ are c.p.c. maps with $ \phi (a) \leq \psi (a)$ for all positive $a \in A$ . If $\psi $ is order zero, then so is $\phi $ .

Proof Fix a faithful representation $B \subseteq \mathcal B(\mathcal H)$ . If $a, b \in A$ are positive with $ab = 0$ , then $\psi (a) \psi (b) = 0$ . Combining this with the inequalities $0 \leq \phi (a) \leq \psi (a)$ and $0 \leq \phi (b) \leq \psi (b)$ yields

(2.24) $$ \begin{align} \overline{\phi(b)\mathcal H} \subseteq \overline{\psi(b)\mathcal H} \subseteq \ker \psi(a) \subseteq \ker \phi(a), \end{align} $$

and hence $\phi (a) \phi (b) = 0$ .

3 Finite covering dimension and property $\Gamma $

We now begin our journey towards Theorem 1.2. As the argument is fairly technical, we have broken it down into a series of lemmas, each presented in its own subsection together with some additional commentary. For convenience, we shall make the following global notational conventions.

Notation 3.1 We write $e_1,\dots ,e_k$ for the minimal projections of $\mathbb C^k$ and $1_k$ for the unit of $\mathbb C^k$ . For $z_1, z_2 \in \mathbb C$ and $\epsilon> 0$ , we write $z_1 \approx _\epsilon z_2$ as a shorthand for $|z_1 - z_2| \leq \epsilon $ . For positive elements x and y of a C $^*$ -algebra, we write $x \perp y$ if $xy = yx = 0$ . For future use in functional calculus, we define the continuous functions $g_{\gamma _1,\gamma _2}\in C_0(0,1]$ , where $0\leq \gamma _1<\gamma _2\leq 1$ , by

(3.1) $$ \begin{align} g_{\gamma_1, \gamma_2}(t) = \begin{cases} 0, & 0 < t \leq \gamma_1; \\ \frac{t - \gamma_1}{\gamma_2 - \gamma_1}, & \gamma_1 < t < \gamma_2; \\ 1, & \gamma_2 \leq t \leq 1. \end{cases} \end{align} $$

Our construction makes systematic use of c.p.c. order zero maps $\phi \colon \mathbb C^k \rightarrow A$ , where A is a C $^*$ -algebra of interest. The reader is encouraged to think of these objects as a convenient packaging for k mutually orthogonal positive contractions in the C $^*$ -algebra A, namely the elements $\phi (e_1),\ldots ,\phi (e_k) \in A$ . Note that $\phi $ being a $^*$ -homomorphism is equivalent to these positive elements being projections.

3.1 The core partition of unity argument

The first step in the proof of Theorem 1.2 is to apply a standard W $^*$ -bundle partition of unity results to the property that all the fibres are II $_1$ factors with property $\Gamma $ . In each fibre, we have k orthogonal and approximately central projections, each of trace $1/k$ , that sum to the identity. Gluing them together over a partition of unity results in approximately central positive contractions $a_1, \ldots , a_k \in {\mathcal {M}}$ , each of trace approximately $1/k$ , that sum to the identify.

Using that $m = \dim (K) < \infty $ , we can chose the aforementioned partition of unity so that any point in K is contained in the support of at most $m+1$ of the functions in the partition. This allows us to decompose each $a_j$ as a sum $\sum _{c = 0}^m a_j^{(c)}$ , where each $a_j^{(c)}$ is a positive contraction and, for each $c \in \{0,\ldots ,m\}$ , the elements $a_1^{(c)}, \ldots , a_k^{(c)}$ are mutually orthogonal, providing an ‘ $(m+1)$ -coloured’ version of property $\Gamma $ .

It is crucial in the rest of the argument that m can be chosen uniformly over $k \in \mathbb N$ and over all tolerances used to measure approximate centrality (i.e., that m does not depend on the separable set S). This is where the finiteness of $\dim (K)$ enters the proof of Theorem 1.2.

Lemma 3.2 (cf. [Reference Toms, White and Winter26, Lemma 4.1])

Let $m \in \mathbb N$ and let $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ be a $W^*$ -bundle whose fibres are II $_1$ factors with property $\Gamma $ and such that $\dim (K) \leq m$ . Further, let $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ be a $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset. Then for every $k \in \mathbb N$ there exist c.p.c. order zero maps $\Phi ^{(0)},\dots ,\Phi ^{(m)}\colon \mathbb C^k \to \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ such that

(3.2) $$ \begin{align} \sum_{c'=0}^m \Phi^{(c')}(1_k) &= 1_{\mathcal{M}^\infty} \end{align} $$

and

(3.3) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(\Phi^{(c)}(e_j)))&=\frac1k\tau(f(\Phi^{(c)}(1_k))) \end{align} $$

for all $\tau \in K^\infty ,\ c\in \{0,\dots ,m\},\ j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ , and $f \in C_0(0,1]$ .

Proof Unpacking the sequence algebra formalism, it suffices to show that for any finite set $\mathcal F \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ , $N\in \mathbb N$ , and $\epsilon>0$ , there are c.p.c. order zero maps $\Phi ^{(0)},\dots ,\Phi ^{(m)}\colon \mathbb C^k \to \mathcal {M}$ such that

(3.4) $$ \begin{align} \Big\|\sum_{c'=0}^m \Phi^{(c')}(1_k)-1_{\mathcal{M}}\Big\|_{2, \mathrm{u}} &\leq \epsilon, \end{align} $$
(3.5) $$ \begin{align} \big\|[\Phi^{(c)}(e_j),b]\big\|_{2, \mathrm{u}} &\leq \epsilon, \end{align} $$

and

(3.6) $$ \begin{align} \big|\tau(\Phi^{(c)}(e_j)^n)-\frac1k\tau(\Phi^{(c)}(1_k)^n)\big| &\leq \epsilon \end{align} $$

for all $\tau \in K$ , $c\in \{0,\dots ,m\}$ , $j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ , $n\in \{1,\dots ,N\}$ , and $b \in \mathcal F$ .

For every $\tau \in K$ , since $\pi _\tau (\mathcal {M})$ has property $\Gamma $ , there exists a unital $^*$ -homomorphism $\mathbb C^k \to \pi _\tau (\mathcal {M})$ such that the image of each $e_j$ has trace $\frac 1k$ and $\|\cdot \|_{2,\tau }$ -approximately commutes with $\pi _\tau (\mathcal F)$ .

By [Reference Loring17, Theorem 4.6] (cf. [Reference Akemann and Pedersen1, Proposition 2.6]), the cone over $\mathbb C^k$ is a projective C $^*$ -algebra. Combined with the structure theorem for order zero maps [Reference Winter and Zacharias28, Corollary 3.1], this implies that the constructed $^*$ -homomorphism $\mathbb C^k \to \pi _\tau (\mathcal {M})$ lifts to a c.p.c. order zero map $\phi _\tau \colon \mathbb {C}^k \rightarrow \mathcal {M}$ . Let $\epsilon> 0$ . By continuity, there is a neighborhood $V_\tau $ of $\tau $ in K such that for all $\sigma \in V_\tau $ ,

(3.7) $$ \begin{align} \|\phi_\tau(1_k)-1_{\mathcal{M}}\|_{2,\sigma} &\leq \frac\epsilon{m+1}, \end{align} $$
(3.8) $$ \begin{align} \|[\phi_\tau(e_j),b]\|_{2,\sigma} &\leq \epsilon, \end{align} $$

and

(3.9) $$ \begin{align} \sigma(\phi_\tau(e_j)^n)&\approx_{\epsilon/2} 1/k \end{align} $$

for all $b \in \mathcal F$ , $j\in \{1, \ldots , k\}$ , and $n\in \{1, \ldots , N\}$ .Footnote 8

By compactness and since $\dim (K) \leq m$ , we may find a finite $(m+1)$ -coloured refinement of $\{V_\tau :\tau \in K\}$ —that is, an open cover of K consisting of open sets $U_i^{(c)}$ for $i\in \{1,\dots ,l_c\}$ and $c\in \{0,\dots ,m\}$ such that each $U_i^{(c)}$ is contained in $V_{\tau _i^{(c)}}$ for some $\tau _i^{(c)}\in K$ , and for each c, the sets $U_1^{(c)},\dots ,U_{l_c}^{(c)}$ are disjoint. Let $(h_i^{(c)})_{c=0,\dots ,m;\,i=1,\dots ,l_c}$ be a partition of unity in $C(K) \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ subordinate to this open cover. We now define

(3.10) $$ \begin{align} \Phi^{(c)}= \sum_{i=1}^{l_c} h_i^{(c)}\phi_{\tau_i^{(c)}}\colon \mathbb C^k \to \mathcal{M}. \end{align} $$

Since each $\phi _{\tau }$ is c.p.c. order zero and $h_1^{(c)},\dots ,h_{l_c}^{(c)}$ are mutually orthogonal and central, it follows that $\Phi ^{(c)}$ is itself a c.p.c. order zero map.

To show (3.4), we note that for each $c \in \{0,\ldots ,m\}$ we have

(3.11) $$ \begin{align} \Big\|\Phi^{(c)}(1_k)-\sum_{i=1}^{l_c} h_i^{(c)}\Big\|_{2, \mathrm{u}} &\leq \Big\|\sum_{i=1}^{l_c}(\phi_{\tau_i^{(c)}}(1_k)-1_{\mathcal{M}}) h_i^{(c)}\Big\|_{2, \mathrm{u}} \leq \frac{\epsilon}{m+1} \end{align} $$

by (3.7) since every $\tau \in K$ is in the support of at most one of the functions $h_1^{(c)},\ldots ,h_{l_c}^{(c)}$ . Summing over all $c\in \{0,\dots ,m\}$ and using the triangle inequality, we obtain (3.4) since $\sum _{c,i} h_i^{(c)}=1_{\mathcal {M}}$ .

To show (3.5), fix $c\in \{0,\dots ,m\}$ , $j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ , and $b \in \mathcal F$ . For $\tau \in K$ , there is at most one $i\in \{1,\dots ,l_c\}$ such that $\tau \in U_i^{(c)}$ . If no such i exists, then $\big \|[\Phi ^{(c)}(e_j),b]\big \|_{2,\tau } =0$ , and otherwise, for this i, we have

(3.12) $$ \begin{align} \big\|[\Phi^{(c)}(e_j),b]\big\|_{2,\tau} &{\stackrel{(3.10)}{=}} \big\|[h_i^{(c)}\phi_{\tau_i^{(c)}}(e_j),b]\big\|_{2,\tau} {\stackrel{(3.8)}{\leq}} \epsilon. \end{align} $$

Similarly for (3.6), fix $\tau \in K$ , $c\in \{0,\ldots ,m\}$ , and $n\in \{1,\ldots ,N\}$ . If there is no i for which $\tau \in U_i^{(c)}$ , then

(3.13) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi^{(c)}(e_j)^n)=\tau(\Phi^{(c)}(1_k)^n)=0 \end{align} $$

for all $j \in \{1, \ldots , k\}$ . Otherwise, there is exactly one i for which $\tau \in U_i^{(c)}$ , and then we have, for $j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ ,

(3.14) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi^{(c)}(e_j)^n) &{\stackrel{(3.10)}=} \tau((h_i^{(c)})^n\phi_{\tau_i^{(c)}}(e_j)^n) \nonumber \\ &{=}\ \tau((h_i^{(c)})^n)\tau(\phi_{\tau_i^{(c)}}(e_j)^n) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.9)}\approx}_{\epsilon/2} \frac1k\tau((h_i^{(c)})^n),\nonumber \end{align} $$

where the unlabeled inequality uses that the $h_{i}^{(c)}$ are central and $\tau $ is an extremal trace on ${\mathcal {M}}$ (as the fibre over $\tau $ is a factor).Footnote 9 Since $\Phi ^{(c)}$ is c.p.c. order zero, we have $\Phi ^{(c)}(1_k)^n = \sum _{j'=1}^k \Phi ^{(c)}(e_{j'})^n$ . Thus,

(3.15) $$ \begin{align} \frac1k\tau(\Phi^{(c)}(1_k)^n)&=\frac1k\sum_{j'=1}^k \tau(\Phi^{(c)}(e_{j'})^n) \nonumber\\ &\approx_{\epsilon/2} \frac1k\tau((h_i^{(c)})^n) \\ &\approx_{\epsilon/2} \tau(\Phi^{(c)}(e_j)^n)\nonumber \end{align} $$

for all $j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ , using (3.14) for both approximations.

3.2 Orthogonal tracial division

The next step towards proving Theorem 1.2 is the construction of mutually orthogonal positive contractions in $\mathcal {M}^\infty $ that commute with a given separable subset S, satisfy tracial factorization with respect to S, and do not vanish on any trace in $K^\infty $ . The existence of such families of mutually orthogonal positive contractions follows from Lemma 3.2 and makes crucial use of the fact that m is independent of k.

Lemma 3.3 (cf. [Reference Toms, White and Winter26, Lemma 4.3])

Given $m,r \in \mathbb {N}$ , there exists $\gamma _{m,r}>0$ with the following property: for any $W^*$ -bundle $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ with $\dim (K)\leq m$ whose fibres are II $_1$ factors with property $\Gamma $ and $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ , there exist mutually orthogonal positive contractions $d_0,\dots ,d_r\in \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ such that

(3.16) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(d_i)s)&=\tau(f(d_i))\tau(s) \end{align} $$

and

(3.17) $$ \begin{align} \tau(d_i) &\geq \gamma_{m,r} \end{align} $$

for all $i\in \{0,\dots ,r\},\ s\in S,\ \tau \in K^\infty $ , and $f \in C_0(0,1]$ .

Proof Fix $m \in \mathbb N$ . We begin with the case $r = 1$ and define

(3.18) $$ \begin{align} \gamma_{m,1} = \frac1{4(m+1)}. \end{align} $$

Let $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ be $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable. Let $\mathcal {M}_0 \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ be a $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subalgebra of $\mathcal {M}$ such that Lemma 2.4 holds.

It suffices to prove that there exist orthogonal positive contractions $d_0',d_1'\in \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ such that

(3.19) $$ \begin{align} \tau(d_i')\geq \gamma_{m,1} \end{align} $$

for all $\tau \in K^\infty $ and $i\in \{0,1\}$ . Indeed, taking T to be the C $^*$ -algebra generated by $d_0'$ and $d_1'$ , Lemma 2.4 provides us with a reindexing $^*$ -homomorphism $\psi _\rho :\mathcal {M}^\infty \rightarrow \mathcal {M}^\infty $ such that $\psi _\rho (T) \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ and the tracial factorization in (2.14) holds. Define $d_i = \psi _\rho (d_i')$ for $i\in \{0,1\}$ and note that (3.16) follows from (2.14). Further, for all $\tau \in K^\infty $ , we have $\tau \circ \psi _\rho \in K^\infty $ , so (3.17) follows from (3.19).

Let $\Phi ^{(0)},\dots ,\Phi ^{(m)}\colon \mathbb C^{2(m+1)} \to \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ be given by Lemma 3.2 (with $S=\mathcal {M}_0$ and $k=2(m+1)$ ). Define

(3.20) $$ \begin{align} a= \sum_{c=0}^m \Phi^{(c)}(e_1), \end{align} $$

which is a positive contraction in $\mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ since $\sum _c \Phi ^{(c)}$ is a u.c.p. map. Making use of the continuous functions defined in (3.1), set

(3.21) $$ \begin{align} d_0'= g_{\gamma_{m,1},2\gamma_{m,1}}(a) \quad \text{and} \quad d_1'= 1_{\mathcal{M}^\infty}-g_{0,\gamma_{m,1}}(a) \end{align} $$

and note that these are orthogonal positive contractions in $\mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ by construction.

To show (3.19) for $i=0$ , observe that $g_{\gamma _{m,1},2\gamma _{m,1}}(t) \geq t - \gamma _{m,1}$ for all $t \in [0,1]$ , and so for $\tau \in K^\infty $ ,

(3.22) $$ \begin{align} \tau(d_0') &{\geq} \tau(a) - \gamma_{m,1} \nonumber \\ &{\stackrel{(3.20)}{=}} \sum_{c=0}^m \tau(\Phi^{(c)}(e_1)) - \gamma_{m,1} \nonumber\\ &{\stackrel{(3.3)}{=}} \tfrac{1}{2(m+1)} \sum_{c=0}^m \tau(\Phi^{(c)}(1_{2(m+1)})) - \gamma_{m,1}\\ &{\stackrel{(3.2)}{=}} \tfrac{1}{2(m+1)} - \gamma_{m,1} \nonumber\\ &{\stackrel{(3.18)}{=}} \gamma_{m,1}.\nonumber \end{align} $$

To show (3.19) for $i=1$ , we compute that for $\tau \in K^\infty $ ,

(3.23) $$ \begin{align} \tau(1_{\mathcal{M}^\infty} - d_1')\ &{=}\ \tau(g_{0,\gamma_{m,1}}(a)) \nonumber\\ &{\leq} \lim_{l \rightarrow \infty} \tau(a^{1/l})\nonumber\\ &{\stackrel{(3.20)}{=}} \lim_{l \rightarrow \infty} \tau\Big(\Big(\sum_{c=0}^m\Phi^{(c)}(e_1)\Big)^{1/l}\Big)\nonumber\\ &{\leq} \lim_{l \rightarrow \infty} \sum_{c=0}^m \tau(\Phi^{(c)}(e_1)^{1/l}) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.3)}{=}} \lim_{l \rightarrow \infty} \sum_{c=0}^m \tfrac{1}{2(m+1)}\tau(\Phi^{(c)}(1_{2(m+1)})^{1/l}) {\leq} \tfrac{m+1}{2(m+1)} {=} \tfrac{1}{2},\nonumber \end{align} $$

where in the fourth line we use the fact that $\sum _{c=0}^m\Phi ^{(c)}(e_1)$ is Cuntz subequivalent to $\bigoplus _{c=0}^m\Phi ^{(c)}(e_1)$ .Footnote 10 Thus, $\tau (d_1') \geq 1/2 \geq \gamma _{m,1}$ . This completes the proof of the case $r=1$ .

In the general case, by enlarging r, we may assume $r = 2^l - 1$ for some $l \geq 1$ . We will prove the result by induction on l, starting with the case $l = 1$ handled above. Fix $m\in \mathbb N$ and a $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset $S \subseteq M^\infty $ . Assume the result holds for $r = 2^l - 1$ and let $d_0, \ldots , d_r \in {\mathcal {M}}^\infty \cap S'$ be positive orthogonal contractions satisfying (3.16) and (3.17). Let $T \subseteq {\mathcal {M}}^\infty $ denote the C $^*$ -algebra generated by $S \cup \{ d_0, \ldots , d_r \}$ . Note that T is $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable.

By the $r=1$ case proved above (but now with T replacing S), there are positive orthogonal contractions $\tilde {d}_0, \tilde {d}_1 \in {\mathcal {M}}^\infty \cap T'$ satisfying

(3.24) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(\tilde{d}_i)t)&=\tau(f(\tilde{d}_i))\tau(t) \end{align} $$

and

(3.25) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\tilde{d}_i) &\geq \gamma_{m,1} \end{align} $$

for all $i\in \{0, 1\}$ , $t \in T$ , $\tau \in K^\infty $ , and $f \in C_0((0, 1])$ . We will show the $2^{l+1}$ elements $\tilde d_i d_j \in {\mathcal {M}}^\infty \cap S'$ for $i\in \{0, 1\}$ and $j\in \{0, \ldots , r\}$ satisfy the required properties with $\gamma _{m, 2r+1} = \gamma _{m, 1} \gamma _{m, r}$ .

First note that the $\tilde d_i d_j$ are clearly mutually orthogonal positive contractions as each $\tilde d_i$ commutes with each $d_j$ by construction. For all $i\in \{0, 1\}$ , $j\in \{0, \ldots , r\}$ and $\tau \in K^\infty $ , we have

(3.26) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\tilde d_i d_j) \stackrel{(3.24)}{=} \tau(\tilde d_i) \tau(d_j) \geq \gamma_{m, 1} \gamma_{m, r} = \gamma_{m, 2r+1}. \end{align} $$

Let $i \in \{0, 1\}$ , $j \in \{0, \ldots , r\}$ , $s \in S$ , $\tau \in K^\infty $ , and $n \in \mathbb N$ . Then

(3.27) $$ \begin{align} \tau((\tilde d_i d_j)^n s)\ &{=}\ \tau(\tilde d_i^n d_j^n s) \nonumber\\ &{\stackrel{(3.24)}{=}} \tau(\tilde d_i^n) \tau(d_j^n s) \nonumber\\ &{\stackrel{(3.16)}{=}} \tau(\tilde d_i^n) \tau(d_j^n) \tau(s) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.24)}{=}} \tau(\tilde d_i^n d_j^n) \tau(s) \nonumber\\ &{=}\ \tau((\tilde d_i d_j)^n) \tau(s).\nonumber \end{align} $$

By the Stone–Weierstrass theorem, this implies

(3.28) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(\tilde d_i d_j)s) = \tau(f(\tilde d_i d_j)) \tau(s) \end{align} $$

for all $f \in C_0(0,1]$ .

3.3 Orthogonal gluing

A sum of c.p.c. order zero maps is typically no longer order zero. One way to get an order zero sum is to ensure that the ranges of the maps to be summed are orthogonal.

We can force this to be the case by multiplying the order zero maps with orthogonal positive contractions commuting with the ranges. The following lemma carries out this orthogonal gluing for the c.p.c. order zero maps constructed in Lemma 3.2 using the orthogonal positive contractions constructed in Lemma 3.3.

This gluing operation does not preserve unitality, but we can compute a uniform lower bound for the trace of the image of the unit. In the next lemma, it is crucial that $\alpha $ depends only on the dimension m of the base space and is independent of both the integer k and the separable subset $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ .Footnote 11

Lemma 3.4 (cf. [Reference Toms, White and Winter26, Proposition 4.4])

Given $m \in \mathbb {N}$ , there exists $\alpha \in (0,1]$ such that the following holds: for any $k \in \mathbb N$ , $W^*$ -bundle $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ with $\dim (K)\leq m$ whose fibres are II $_1$ factors with property $\Gamma $ , and $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ , there exists a c.p.c. order zero map $\Phi \colon \mathbb C^k \to \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ such that

(3.29) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi(1_k)) &\geq \alpha, \end{align} $$
(3.30) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(\Phi(e_j))) &= \frac{1}{k}\tau(f(\Phi(1_k))), \end{align} $$

and

(3.31) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(\Phi(e_j))s) &= \tau(f(\Phi(e_j)))\tau(s) \end{align} $$

for all $\tau \in K^\infty ,\ j\in \{1,\dots ,k\},\ f\in C_0(0,1]$ , and $s\in S$ .

Proof Set $\alpha =\gamma _{m,m}$ from Lemma 3.3. Fix $k \in \mathbb N$ and let $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ be a W $^*$ -bundle with $\dim (K)\leq m$ whose fibres are II $_1$ factors with property $\Gamma $ . Further, fix a $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ .

Let $\mathcal {M}_0 \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ be the $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset of $\mathcal {M}$ such that Lemma 2.4 holds. It suffices to prove that there exists a c.p.c. order zero map $\Phi \colon \mathbb C^k \to \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ such that (3.29) and (3.30) hold for all $\tau \in K^\infty ,\ j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ and $f\in C_0(0,1]$ . Indeed, taking T to be the C $^*$ -algebra generated by $\{\Phi (e_j): j =1,\ldots ,k\}$ , Lemma 2.4 provides us with a reindexing $^*$ -homomorphism $\psi _\rho :\mathcal {M}^\infty \rightarrow \mathcal {M}^\infty $ such that, after replacing $\Phi $ with $\psi _\rho \circ \Phi $ , all three conditions (3.29), (3.30), and (3.31) are satisfied.

Let $\Phi ^{(0)},\ldots ,\Phi ^{(m)}\colon \mathbb {C}^{k}\rightarrow \mathcal {M} \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ be maps as in Lemma 3.2. Let $d_0,\ldots ,d_m \in \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \big (\Phi ^{(0)}(\mathbb C^k) \cup \cdots \cup \Phi ^{(m)}(\mathbb C^k) \cup \mathcal {M}_0\big )'$ be orthogonal positive contractions, constructed using Lemma 3.3, such that

(3.32) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(d_i)b)&= \tau(f(d_i))\tau(b) \end{align} $$

and

(3.33) $$ \begin{align} \tau(d_i) &\geq \gamma_{m,m} = \alpha \end{align} $$

for all $c\in \{0,\dots ,m\}$ , $b \in \mathrm {C}^*(\Phi ^{(c)}(\mathbb C^k))$ , $\tau \in K^\infty $ , and $f\in C_0(0,1]$ . Define

(3.34) $$ \begin{align} \Phi = \sum_{c=0}^m d_c\Phi^{(c)}\colon\mathbb{C}^k \rightarrow \mathcal{M}^\infty \cap \mathcal{M}_0'. \end{align} $$

Since the $d_0,\ldots ,d_m$ are orthogonal positive contractions commuting with the images of the $\Phi ^{(c)}$ , $\Phi $ is c.p.c. order zero.

Let $\tau \in K^\infty $ , $j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ , and $n\in \mathbb N$ . Then

(3.35) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi(e_j)^n) & {\stackrel{(3.34)}=} \sum_{c=0}^m \tau(d_c^n\Phi^{(c)}(e_j)^n)\nonumber\\ &{\stackrel{(3.32)}{=}} \sum_{c=0}^m \tau(d_c^n)\tau(\Phi^{(c)}(e_j)^n)\nonumber\\ &{\stackrel{(3.3)}=} \sum_{c=0}^m \frac{1}{k}\tau(d_c^n)\tau(\Phi^{(c)}(1_k)^n)\\ &{\stackrel{(3.32)}{=}} \frac1k \sum_{c=0}^m \tau(d_c^n\Phi^{(c)}(1_k)^n){\stackrel{(3.34)}=} \frac{1}{k}\tau(\Phi(1_k)^n),\nonumber \end{align} $$

using in the first and last lines that the $d_c$ are mutually orthogonal and each $d_c$ commutes with the range of each $\Phi ^{(c')}$ . By linearity, continuity, and the Stone–Weierstrass theorem, (3.30) follows from (3.35).

Now let $\tau \in K^\infty $ . Then

(3.36) $$ \begin{align} \begin{aligned} \tau(\Phi(1_k)) &{\stackrel{(3.34)}=} \sum_{c=0}^m \tau(d_c\Phi^{(c)}(1_k))\\ &{\stackrel{(3.32)}{=}} \sum_{c=0}^m \tau(d_c)\tau(\Phi^{(c)}(1_k))\\ &{\stackrel{(3.33)}{\geq}} \sum_{c=0}^m \alpha\tau(\Phi^{(c)}(1_k)). \end{aligned} \end{align} $$

Hence, $\tau (\Phi (1_k)) \geq \alpha $ by (3.2). This verifies (3.29).

3.4 The maximality argument

Theorem 1.2 is now proven via a maximality argument based on Lemma 3.4. Roughly, if we can take $\alpha = 1$ in Lemma 3.4, then Theorem 1.2 follows. By a reindexing argument, there is a maximal $\alpha _0$ which satisfies Lemma 3.4. If $\alpha _0 < 1$ , we will use Lemma 3.3 and the order zero functional calculus (see Section 2.5) to construct a larger $\alpha $ satisfying Lemma 3.4, which will yield a contradiction.

Proof Proof (Theorem 1.2)

Suppose $({\mathcal {M}}, K, E)$ is a W $^*$ -bundle such that $m = \dim (K) < \infty $ and every fibre of $\mathcal M$ is a II $_1$ factor with property $\Gamma $ . Let $\Omega $ be the set of all $\alpha \in [0,1]$ for which the conclusion of Lemma 3.4 holds, and set $\alpha _0 = \sup \Omega $ . Lemma 3.4 implies $\alpha _0> 0$ . Moreover, a standard reindexing argument shows that $\Omega $ is a closed set, so $\alpha _0 \in \Omega $ .

It suffices to show that $\alpha _0 = 1$ . Indeed, in this case, for every $k \in \mathbb N$ and $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm u}$ -separable subset $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ , there exists a c.p.c. order zero map $\Phi \colon \mathbb C^k \rightarrow \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ such that

(3.37) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi(1_k)) &\geq 1, \end{align} $$
(3.38) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi(e_j)) &= \frac{1}{k}\tau(\Phi(1_k)), \end{align} $$

and

(3.39) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi(e_j)s) = \tau(\Phi(e_j))\tau(s) \end{align} $$

for all $\tau \in K^\infty ,\ j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ , and $s\in S$ . It follows from (3.37) that $\tau (1_{\mathcal {M}^\infty }-\Phi (1_k)) \leq 0$ for all $\tau \in K^\infty $ . Since $1_{\mathcal {M}^\infty } - \Phi (1_k)$ is positive, this implies $\Phi (1_k)=1_{\mathcal {M}^\infty }$ . By [Reference Winter and Zacharias28, Theorem 3.3], a u.c.p. order zero map is a $^*$ -homomorphism. Therefore, $\Phi (e_1),\ldots ,\Phi (e_k)$ are orthogonal projections summing to $1_{\mathcal {M}^\infty }$ , and by (3.38) and (3.39), these projections witness that $\mathcal {M}$ has property $\Gamma $ .

Assume for the sake of contradiction that $\alpha _0<1$ . Let $\gamma = \gamma _{m,1}> 0$ be as in Lemma 3.3. Since $0 < \alpha _0 < 1$ and $\gamma> 0$ , we may choose $\epsilon>0$ so that

(3.40) $$ \begin{align} \alpha = \alpha_0+\gamma(\alpha_0-\alpha_0^2)-\epsilon(1-\gamma\alpha_0)> \alpha_0. \end{align} $$

We will show that the conclusion of Lemma 3.4 holds with this $\alpha $ (i.e., $\alpha \in \Omega $ ), which will be a contradiction.

Suppose $k \in \mathbb N$ and let $S \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty $ be a $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subset. Let $\mathcal {M}_0 \subseteq \mathcal {M}$ be a $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -separable subalgebra obtained by applying Lemma 2.4 to S. By hypothesis, there exists a c.p.c. order zero map $\Phi _0\colon \mathbb {C}^k \rightarrow \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ satisfying

(3.41) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi_0(1_k)) &\geq \alpha_0, \end{align} $$
(3.42) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(\Phi_0(e_j))) &= \frac{1}{k}\tau(f(\Phi_0(1_k))), \end{align} $$

and

(3.43) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(\Phi_0(e_j))b) = \tau(f(\Phi_0(e_j)))\tau(b) \end{align} $$

for all $\tau \in K^\infty ,\ j\in \{1,\dots ,k\},\ f\in C_0(0,1]$ , and $b\in \mathcal {M}_0$ . Using Lemma 3.3, let $d_0,d_1 \in \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap (\mathcal {M}_0 \cup \Phi _0(\mathbb C^k))'$ be orthogonal positive contractions such that

(3.44) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(d_i)b)= \tau(f(d_i))\tau(b) \end{align} $$

and

(3.45) $$ \begin{align} \tau(d_i) \geq \gamma \end{align} $$

for all $i\in \{0,1\},\ \tau \in K^\infty $ , $f \in C_0(0,1]$ , and $b \in \mathrm {C}^*(\Phi _0(\mathbb C^k))$ .

Let $g_{0,\epsilon },g_{\epsilon ,2\epsilon } \in C_0(0,1]$ be the continuous functions defined in (3.1) and set $\Delta _\epsilon = g_{0,\epsilon } - g_{\epsilon ,2\epsilon }$ . Using the order zero functional calculus, define $\Phi _0' \colon \mathbb C^k \to \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ by

(3.46) $$ \begin{align} \begin{aligned} \Phi_0' &= d_0\Delta_\epsilon(\Phi_0)+g_{\epsilon,2\epsilon}(\Phi_0) \\ &= d_0 g_{0, \epsilon}(\Phi_0) + (1 - d_0) g_{\epsilon, 2\epsilon}(\Phi_0). \end{aligned} \end{align} $$

Since $d_0$ commutes with $\mathrm {C}^*(\Phi _0(\mathbb C^k))$ and $g_{\epsilon , 2\epsilon } \leq g_{0, \epsilon }$ , we have that $\Phi _0' \leq g_{0, \epsilon }(\Phi _0)$ . Since $g_{0, \epsilon }(\Phi _0)$ is c.p.c. order zero, so is $\Phi _0'$ by Lemma 2.8. Fix $\tau \in K^\infty $ , $j \in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ , and $n \in \mathbb N$ . Using Lemma 2.7 and the binomial theorem, we compute that

(3.47) $$ \begin{align} \begin{aligned} \tau(\Phi_0'(e_j)^n) &{\stackrel{(3.46)}=} \sum_{i=0}^n \binom ni \tau\big(d_0^i(\Delta_\epsilon^ig_{\epsilon,2\epsilon}^{n-i})(\Phi_0(e_j))\big) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.44)}=} \sum_{i=0}^n \binom ni \tau(d_0^i)\tau\big((\Delta_\epsilon^ig_{\epsilon,2\epsilon}^{n-i})(\Phi_0(e_j))\big) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.42)}=} \frac1k \sum_{i=0}^n \binom ni \tau(d_0^i)\tau\big((\Delta_\epsilon^ig_{\epsilon,2\epsilon}^{n-i})(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.44)}{=}} \frac1k \sum_{i=0}^n \binom ni \tau\big(d_0^i (\Delta_\epsilon^ig_{\epsilon, 2\epsilon}^{n -i})(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.46)}{=}} \frac1k \tau(\Phi_0'(1_k)^n). \end{aligned} \end{align} $$

Next, we define the positive contractionFootnote 12

(3.48) $$ \begin{align} h = d_1(1_{M^\infty}-g_{0,\epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))) \in \mathcal{M}^\infty \cap (\mathcal{M}_0 \cup \Phi_0(\mathbb C^k))'. \end{align} $$

Since $d_0\perp d_1$ and $(1_{\mathcal {M}^\infty }-g_{0,\epsilon }(\Phi _0(1_k)))\perp g_{\epsilon ,2\epsilon }(\Phi _0(1_k))$ , we see that

(3.49) $$ \begin{align} h \perp d_0\Delta_\epsilon(\Phi_0(1_k))+g_{\epsilon,2\epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k)) \stackrel{(3.46)}{=}\Phi_0'(1_k). \end{align} $$

Using again that $\alpha _0$ satisfies Lemma 3.4, there is a c.p.c. order zero map $\Phi _1\colon \mathbb {C}^k \rightarrow \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap (\mathcal {M}_0 \cup \{h\})'$ satisfying

(3.50) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi_1(1_k)) &\geq \alpha_0, \end{align} $$
(3.51) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(\Phi_1(e_j))) &= \frac{1}{k}\tau(f(\Phi_1(1_k))), \end{align} $$

and

(3.52) $$ \begin{align} \tau(f(\Phi_1(x))b) = \tau(f(\Phi_1(x)))\tau(b) \end{align} $$

for all $\tau \in K^\infty ,\ x \in \mathbb C^k,\ f\in C_0(0,1]$ , and $b \in \mathrm {C}^*(h)$ . Now, define

(3.53) $$ \begin{align} \Phi=\Phi_0'+h\Phi_1\colon\mathbb C^k \to \mathcal{M}^\infty \cap \mathcal{M}_0'. \end{align} $$

Since h commutes with the range of $\Phi _1$ , $h\Phi _1$ is c.p.c. order zero. By (3.49), h is orthogonal to $\Phi _0'(1_k)$ , and using the structure theorem for order zero maps, h is also orthogonal to the range of $\Phi _0'$ . So $\Phi $ is a sum of c.p.c. order zero maps with orthogonal ranges and hence is itself a c.p.c. order zero map.

We shall show that $\Phi $ satisfies both (3.29) and (3.30). First, we show (3.30). For $\tau \in K^\infty $ , $j\in \{1,\dots ,k\}$ , and $n \in \mathbb N$ , we have

(3.54) $$ \begin{align} \begin{aligned} \tau(\Phi(e_j)^n) &{\stackrel{(3.53)}=} \tau(\Phi_0'(e_j)^n+h^n\Phi_1(e_j)^n) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.52)}=} \tau(\Phi_0'(e_j)^n)+\tau(h^n)\tau(\Phi_1(e_j)^n) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.47),(3.51)}=} \frac1k\tau(\Phi_0'(1_k)^n)+\frac1k\tau(h^n)\tau(\Phi_1(1_k)^n) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.52),(3.53)}=} \frac1k\tau(\Phi(1_k)^n). \end{aligned} \end{align} $$

By linearity, continuity, and the Stone–Weierstrass theorem, (3.30) follows.

We now work towards showing that $\Phi $ satisfies (3.29). Let $\tau \in K^\infty $ . By (3.46), (3.53), and Lemma 2.7, we have

(3.55) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi(1_k)) = \tau(d_0\Delta_\epsilon(\Phi_0(1_k)))+\tau(g_{\epsilon,2\epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k)))+\tau(h\Phi_1(1_k)). \end{align} $$

We estimate the first term of (3.55) as follows:

(3.56) $$ \begin{align} \begin{aligned} \tau\big(d_0\Delta_\epsilon(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) &{\stackrel{(3.44)}{=}} \tau(d_0) \tau\big(\Delta_\epsilon(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.45)}{\geq}} \gamma \tau\big(\Delta_\epsilon(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) \\ &{\geq} \gamma\alpha_0 \tau\big(\Delta_\epsilon(\Phi_0(1_k))\big), \end{aligned} \end{align} $$

where we have used that $\alpha _0 < 1$ in the last line. We estimate the third term of (3.55) as follows:

(3.57) $$ \begin{align} \begin{aligned} \tau(h\Phi_1(1_k)) &{\stackrel{(3.52)}{=}} \tau(h)\tau(\Phi_1(1_k)) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.50)}{\geq}} \alpha_0 \tau(h) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.48)}{=}} \alpha_0 \tau\big(d_1(1_{{\mathcal{M}}^\infty} - g_{0, \epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k)))\big) \\ &{\stackrel{3.44}{=}} \alpha_0 \tau(d_1)\tau\big(1_{{\mathcal{M}}^\infty} - g_{0, \epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.45)}{\geq}} \gamma\alpha_0 \tau\big(1_{{\mathcal{M}}^\infty} - g_{0, \epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))\big). \end{aligned} \end{align} $$

Substituting the estimates (3.56) and (3.57) into (3.55) and using that $\Delta _\epsilon = g_{0, \epsilon } - g_{\epsilon , 2\epsilon }$ , we obtain

(3.58) $$ \begin{align} \tau(\Phi(1_k)) &\geq \gamma\alpha_0 \tau\big(\Delta_\epsilon(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) + \tau\big(g_{\epsilon,2\epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) + \gamma\alpha_0 \tau\big(1_{{\mathcal{M}}^\infty} - g_{0, \epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))\big)\nonumber\\&= \gamma\alpha_0 \tau\big(g_{0, \epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) - \gamma\alpha_0 \tau\big(g_{\epsilon, 2\epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) \nonumber\\&\qquad + \tau\big(g_{\epsilon,2\epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))\big) + \gamma\alpha_0 - \gamma\alpha_0\tau\big(g_{0, \epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))\big)\nonumber\\&= \gamma\alpha_0 + (1 - \gamma\alpha_0) \tau\big(g_{\epsilon,2\epsilon}(\Phi_0(1_k))\big).\nonumber\\ \end{align} $$

Finally, using that $g_{\epsilon , 2\epsilon }(t) \geq t - \epsilon $ for all $t \in [0, 1]$ , we get

(3.59) $$ \begin{align} \begin{aligned} \tau(\Phi(1_k)) &{\geq} \gamma \alpha_0 +(1 - \gamma \alpha_0) \tau\big( \Phi_0(1_k) - \epsilon 1_{{\mathcal{M}}^\infty}\big) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.41)}{\geq}} \gamma \alpha_0 + (1 - \gamma \alpha_0)(\alpha_0 - \epsilon) \\ &{\stackrel{(3.40)}{=}} \alpha, \end{aligned} \end{align} $$

which completes the proof that (3.29) holds.

By Lemma 2.4 with $T = \mathrm {C}^*(\Phi (\mathbb C^k)) \subseteq \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}_0'$ , there exists a strictly increasing function $\rho \colon \mathbb N \to \mathbb N$ such that, after replacing $\Phi $ with $\psi _\rho \circ \Phi \colon \mathbb C^k \rightarrow \mathcal {M}^\infty \cap S'$ , we have that (3.31) holds for all $\tau \in K^\infty ,\ j\in \{1,\dots ,k\},\ f\in C_0(0,1]$ , and $b\in S$ .

From the definition of the reduced power $(\mathcal {M}^\infty , K^\infty , E^\infty )$ , we have $E^\infty \circ \psi _\rho = \psi _\rho \circ E^\infty $ . Hence, it follows that (3.29) and (3.30) continue to hold with $\psi _\rho \circ \Phi $ in place of $\Phi $ . Thus we have shown $\alpha \in \Omega $ , which is our intended contradiction.

Restricting to the case of tracial completions of C $^*$ -algebras with a Bauer simplex of traces, we obtain Theorem 1.1.

Proof Proof (Theorem 1.1)

Let A be a C $^*$ -algebra with $\partial _e T(A)$ non-empty and compact. If A has uniform property $\Gamma $ , then it is clear that $\pi _\tau (A)"$ has property $\Gamma $ for each $\tau \in \partial _e T(A)$ .

Suppose now that $K = \partial _e T(A)$ has finite covering dimension and $\pi _\tau (A)"$ has property $\Gamma $ for each $\tau \in K$ . By [Reference Ozawa21, Theorem 3], the uniform tracial completion $\mathcal {M}=\overline {A}{}^{T(A)}$ has the structure of a W $^*$ -bundle over K with fibres $\pi _\tau (A)"$ for $\tau \in K$ . By Theorem 1.2, $\mathcal {M}$ has property $\Gamma $ . Hence, by $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -density, it follows that A has uniform property $\Gamma $ (see Section 2.4).

Remark 3.5 If $(\mathcal {M},K,E)$ is a W $^*$ -bundle with factorial fibres where K has finite covering dimension and $\pi _\tau (\mathcal {M})"$ is McDuff for every $\tau \in K$ , then $\mathcal {M}$ is McDuff. The proof follows as in the proof of Theorem 1.2 except with the order zero maps $\mathbb C^k \rightarrow {\mathcal {M}}^\infty \cap S'$ replaced with order zero maps $M_k \rightarrow {\mathcal {M}}^\infty \cap \mathcal {M}'$ throughout the proof. This is essentially the proof of [Reference Toms, White and Winter26, Theorem 4.6].

Acknowledgements

This work grew out of the authors’ joint work with José Carrión, Jorge Castillejos, Jamie Gabe, Aaron Tikuisis, and Stuart White in [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5], and we thank them for several discussions regarding this work and related results. We also thank Ilijas Farah for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Finally, we thank the referee for their suggestions.

Footnotes

This research was partially supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—Project-ID 427320536—SFB 1442 (Evington); Germany’s Excellence Strategy EXC 2044 390685587 Mathematics Münster: Dynamic–Geometry–Structure (Evington); ERC Advanced Grant 834267 - AMAREC (Evington); NSF grants DMS-2000129 and DMS-2400178 (Schafhauser).

1 For technical reasons, one should further require $|\tau (ap) - \tau (a)/2| < \epsilon $ for all $a \in \mathcal F$ . We do not know if this extra condition is automatic in general, but it is when $\partial _e T(A)$ is compact [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White8, Corollary 3.2], which is the case of interest in this article.

2 For an analogous result in the infinite case, see [Reference Bosa, Brown, Sato, Tikuisis, White and Winter3, Theorem G] and [Reference Matui and Sato19, Theorem 7.1], noting that simple nuclear infinite $\mathscr {Z}$ -stable $C^*$ -algebras are purely infinite by Kirchberg’s Dichotomy [Reference Blanchard and Kirchberg2, Corollary 3.11(ii)].

3 We recall from [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5, Definition 3.13] that a tracially complete C $^*$ -algebra $({\mathcal {M}}, X)$ is factorial if X is a face in $T({\mathcal {M}})$ . This happens precisely when $\pi _\tau ({\mathcal {M}})"$ is a factor for all $\tau \in \partial _e X$ (see [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5, Proposition 3.14]), and hence factoriality for tracially complete C $^*$ -algebras generalizes the notion of factorial fibres for W $^*$ -bundles.

4 It has become common to use subscripts such as $A_\infty $ for C $^*$ -norm sequence algebras and superscripts such as ${\mathcal {M}}^\infty $ for (uniform) tracial sequence algebras. Since the only C $^*$ -norm sequence algebra appearing in this article is $C(K)^\infty $ (and the C $^*$ -norm on $C(K)$ agrees with the uniform trace norm $\|\cdot \|_{2, T(C(K))}$ ), there should be no ambiguity caused by using the notation $C(K)^\infty $ for the C $^*$ -norm sequence algebra.

5 The only difficult part of showing that $(M^\infty , K^\infty , E^\infty )$ is a W $^*$ -bundle is proving $\|\cdot \|_{2, \mathrm {u}}$ -completeness of the unit ball. This is achieved using Kirchberg’s $\epsilon $ -test; see [Reference Bosa, Brown, Sato, Tikuisis, White and Winter3, Proposition 3.9] or [Reference Carrión, Castillejos, Evington, Gabe, Schafhauser, Tikuisis and White5, Proposition 5.4], for example.

6 The subtlety here is that $\psi _\rho $ is well-defined. This is true for the sequence algebra as $\lim _{n\to \infty }\|a_{\rho (n)}\|_{2, \mathrm {u}} = 0$ whenever $\lim _{n\to \infty }\|a_n\|_{2, \mathrm {u}} = 0$ , but it is not always true for ultrapowers. This is the reason for our choice to work with sequential limits.

7 The statement in [Reference Castillejos, Evington, Tikuisis and White8, Proposition 2.3] assumes separability, but this is not hard to remove from the proof after replacing $A^\infty \cap A'$ with $A^\infty \cap S'$ for separable $S \subseteq A$ .

8 Recall from Section 2.1 that we are identifying the point $\tau \in K$ with the trace $\mathrm {eval}_\tau \circ E$ , and the map $\tau \mapsto \mathrm {eval}_\tau \circ E$ is continuous with respect to the weak $^*$ topology on $T(\mathcal {M})$ .

9 More generally, if A is a C $^*$ -algebra, $h, a \in A$ with h central, and $\tau $ is an extremal trace on A, then $\tau (ha) = \tau (h) \tau (a)$ . Indeed, we may assume $h \geq 0$ . If $\tau (h) = 0$ , this follows from the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality. When $\tau (h) \neq 0$ , note that $b \mapsto \tau (hb)/\tau (h)$ is a trace on A dominated by $\tau (h)^{-1} \tau $ and hence equals $\tau $ .

10 For positive elements a and b in a $C^*$ -algebra A, a is Cuntz subequivalent to b if there is a sequence $(v_n)_{n=1}^\infty \subseteq A$ with $\|v_n^*bv_n - a \| \rightarrow 0$ . The relevance of this relation dates back to [Reference Cuntz11, Section 1].

11 The $\alpha $ constructed is also independent of the bundle $({\mathcal {M}}, K, E)$ itself, but this is not important in the application of the lemma in the proof of Theorem 1.2.

12 To see that h commutes with the range of $\Phi _0$ , note that the structure theorem for order zero maps implies $\Phi _0(1_k)$ commutes with the range of $\Phi _0$ .

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