Centre-valued index for Toeplitz operators with noncommuting symbols

Abstract

We consider an action of the real line on a C*-algebra for which there is a centre-valued invariant trace. We define a family of Toeplitz operators with symbols in the original algebra. When the symbol is invertible, the Toeplitz operator is Fredholm in an appropriate sense, and we give a formula for the index using a notion of centre-valued winding number defined using the trace. The results and techniques generalise previous results of the authors for scalar-valued traces.