C*-crossed-products by an order-two automorphism

Abstract

We describe the representation theory of C*-crossed-products of a unital C*-algebra A by the cyclic group of order 2. We prove that there are two main types of irreducible representations for the crossed-product: those whose restriction to A is irreducible and those who are the sum of two unitarily unequivalent representations of A. We characterize each class in term of the restriction of the representations to the fixed point C*-subalgebra of A. We apply our results to compute the K-theory of several crossed-products of the free group on two generators.