Borel fields and measured fields of Polish spaces, Banach spaces, von Neumann algebras and C*-algebras

Abstract

Several recent articles in operator algebras make a nontrivial use of the theory of measurable fields of von Neumann algebras $(M_x)_{x \in X}$ and related structures. This includes the associated field $(\text{Aut}\ M_x)_{x \in X}$ of automorphism groups and more general measurable fields of Polish groups with actions on Polish spaces. Nevertheless, a fully rigorous and at the same time sufficiently broad and flexible theory of such Borel fields and measurable fields is not available in the literature. We fill this gap in this paper and include a few counterexamples to illustrate the subtlety: for instance, for a Borel field $(M_x)_{x \in X}$ of von Neumann algebras, the field of Polish groups $(\text{Aut}\ M_x)_{x \in X}$ need not be Borel.