Abstract

We investigate the relationship between the facial structure of the unit ball of an operator algebra A and its algebraic structure, including the hereditary subalgebras and the socle of A. Many questions about the facial structure of A are studied with the aid of representation theory. For that purpose we establish the existence of reduced atomic type representations for certain nonselfadjoint operator algebras. Our results are applicable to C^*-algebras, strongly maximal TAF algebras, free semigroup algebras and various semicrossed products.

Authors