Skew Derivations and Deformations of a Family of Group Crossed Products

Abstract

We obtain deformations of a crossed product of a polynomial algebra with a group, under some conditions, from universal deformation formulas. We show that the resulting deformations are nontrivial by a comparison with Hochschild cohomology. The universal deformation formulas arise from actions of Hopf algebras generated by automorphisms and skew derivations, and are universal in the sense that they apply to deform all algebras with such Hopf algebra actions.