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Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society

The Bulletin publishes expository articles on contemporary mathematical research, written in a way that gives insight to mathematicians who may not be experts in the particular topic. The Bulletin also publishes reviews of selected books in mathematics and short articles in the Mathematical Perspectives section, both by invitation only.

ISSN 1088-9485 (online) ISSN 0273-0979 (print)

The 2020 MCQ for Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society is 0.84.

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The classification of subfactors of index at most 5
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by Vaughan F. R. Jones, Scott Morrison and Noah Snyder PDF
Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 51 (2014), 277-327 Request permission

Abstract:

A subfactor is an inclusion $N \subset M$ of von Neumann algebras with trivial centers. The simplest example comes from the fixed points of a group action $M^G \subset M$, and subfactors can be thought of as fixed points of more general group-like algebraic structures. These algebraic structures are closely related to tensor categories and have played important roles in knot theory, quantum groups, statistical mechanics, and topological quantum field theory. There is a measure of size of a subfactor, called the index. Remarkably, the values of the index below 4 are quantized, which suggests that it may be possible to classify subfactors of small index. Subfactors of index at most 4 were classified in the 1980s and early 1990s. The possible index values above 4 are not quantized, but once you exclude a certain family, it turns out that again the possibilities are quantized. Recently, the classification of subfactors has been extended up to index 5, and (outside of the infinite families) there are only 10 subfactors of index between 4 and 5. We give a summary of the key ideas in this classification and discuss what is known about these special small subfactors.
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Additional Information
  • Vaughan F. R. Jones
  • Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, California
  • MR Author ID: 95565
  • Scott Morrison
  • Affiliation: Mathematical Sciences Institute, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
  • MR Author ID: 788724
  • Noah Snyder
  • Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, Columbia University, New York
  • MR Author ID: 667772
  • Received by editor(s): June 18, 2013
  • Published electronically: December 24, 2013
  • Additional Notes: The first author was supported by the NSF under Grant No. DMS-0301173
    The second author was supported by the Australian Research Council under the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award DE120100232, and Discovery Project DP140100732
    The third author was supported by a NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University.
    All authors were supported by DARPA grants HR0011-11-1-0001 and HR0011-12-1-0009.
  • © Copyright 2013 American Mathematical Society
  • Journal: Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 51 (2014), 277-327
  • MSC (2010): Primary 46L37
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/S0273-0979-2013-01442-3
  • MathSciNet review: 3166042