We prove that there exist finitely generated, stably finite algebras which are not linear sofic. This was left open by Arzhantseva and Păunescu in 2017.

We study ring-theoretic (in)finiteness properties—such as Dedekind-finiteness and proper infiniteness—of ultraproducts (and more generally, reduced products) of Banach algebras.

While we characterise when an ultraproduct has these ring-theoretic properties in terms of its underlying sequence of algebras, we find that, contrary to the $C^*$ -algebraic setting, it is not true in general that an ultraproduct has a ring-theoretic finiteness property if and only if “ultrafilter many” of the underlying sequence of algebras have the same property. This might appear to violate the continuous model theoretic counterpart of Łoś’s Theorem; the reason it does not is that for a general Banach algebra, the ring theoretic properties we consider cannot be verified by considering a bounded subset of the algebra of fixed bound. For Banach algebras, we construct counter-examples to show, for example, that each component Banach algebra can fail to be Dedekind-finite while the ultraproduct is Dedekind-finite, and we explain why such a counter-example is not possible for $C^*$ -algebras. Finally, the related notion of having stable rank one is also studied for ultraproducts.

This paper concerns the study of the global structure of measure-preserving actions of countable groups on standard probability spaces. Weak containment is a hierarchical notion of complexity of such actions, motivated by an analogous concept in the theory of unitary representations. This concept gives rise to an associated notion of equivalence of actions, called weak equivalence, which is much coarser than the notion of isomorphism (conjugacy). It is well understood now that, in general, isomorphism is a very complex notion, a fact which manifests itself, for example, in the lack of any reasonable structure in the space of actions modulo isomorphism. On the other hand, the space of weak equivalence classes is quite well behaved. Another interesting fact that relates to the study of weak containment is that many important parameters associated with actions, such as the type, cost, and combinatorial parameters, turn out to be invariants of weak equivalence and in fact exhibit desirable monotonicity properties with respect to the pre-order of weak containment, a fact that can be useful in certain applications. There has been quite a lot of activity in this area in the last few years, and our goal in this paper is to provide a survey of this work.

We study when certain properties of Banach algebras are stable under ultrapower constructions. In particular, we consider when every ultrapower of is Arens regular, and give some evidence that this is so if and only if is isomorphic to a closed subalgebra of operators on a super-reflexive Banach space. We show that such ideas are closely related to whether one can sensibly define an ultrapower of a dual Banach algebraffi We study how tensor products of ultrapowers behave, and apply this to study the question of when every ultrapower of is amenable. We provide an abstract characterization in terms of something like an approximate diagonal, and consider when every ultrapower of a C*-algebra, or a group L1-convolution algebra, is amenable.

It is shown that Schatten $p$-classes of operators between Hilbert spaces of different (infinite) dimensions have ultrapowers which are (completely) isometric to non-commutative ${{L}_{p}}$-spaces. On the other hand, these Schatten classes are not themselves isomorphic to non-commutative ${{L}_{p}}$ spaces. As a consequence, the class of non-commutative ${{L}_{p}}$-spaces is not axiomatizable in the first-order language developed by Henson and Iovino for normed space structures, neither in the signature of Banach spaces, nor in that of operator spaces. Other examples of the same phenomenon are presented that belong to the class of corners of non-commutative ${{L}_{p}}$-spaces. For $p\,=\,1$ this last class, which is the same as the class of preduals of ternary rings of operators, is itself axiomatizable in the signature of operator spaces.