Projective tensor product of protoquantum spaces

Abstract

A proto-quantum space is a (general) matricially normed space in the sense of Effros and Ruan presented in a `matrix-free' language. We show that these spaces have a special (projective) tensor product possessing the universal property with respect to completely bounded bilinear operators. We study some general properties of this tensor product (among them a kind of adjoint associativity), and compute it for some tensor factors, notably for $L_1$ spaces. In particular, we obtain what could be called the proto-quantum version of the Grothendieck theorem about classical projective tensor products by $L_1$ spaces. At the end, we compare the new tensor product with the known projective tensor product of operator spaces, and show that the standard construction of the latter is not fit for general proto-quantum spaces.