On the genericity of irreducible subfactors

Abstract

We show that finitely generated irreducible $\mathrm{II}_1$ subfactors are generic in the following sense. Given a separable $\mathrm{II}_1$ factor $M$ and an integer $n\geq 2$, equip the set of $n$-tuples of self-adjoint operators in $M$ with norm at most $1$ with the metric $d(x,y) = \max_{1\leq i \leq n} \|x_i - y_i\|_2$. Then the set of $n$-tuples that generate an irreducible subfactor of $M$ forms a dense $G_\delta$ set in this metric space. On the way to proving this result, we show that closable derivations vanish on the anticoarse space associated to their kernels, which leads to new applications of conjugate systems in free probability.