Involutions in the Cayley-Dickson construction

Abstract

We determine all involutions in the Cayley-Dickson construction that extend the involution of the original $*$-algebra. We also find all algebra isomorphisms between the resulting Cayley doubles that extend the identity automorphism of the original $*$-algebra, and consequently classify the resulting $*$-algebras up to $*$-algebra isomorphism. As applications, we show that Cayley doubles without zero divisors admit exactly one additional involution, prove that the classical Cayley-Dickson involution is the unique scalar involution, and obtain a classification of the $*$-algebras arising from $\mathbb{R}$ up to dimension 4.