Hochschild cohomology and characteristic classes for star-products

Abstract

We show that the Hochschild cohomology of the algebra obtained by formal deformation quantization on a symplectic manifold is isomorphic to the formal series with coefficients in the de Rham cohomology of the manifold. The cohomology class obtained by differentiating the star-product with respect to the deformation parameter is seen to be closely related to the characteristic class of the quantization. A fundamental role in the analysis is played by ``quantum Liouville operators,'' which rescale the deformation parameter in the same way in which Liouville vector fields scale the Poisson structure (or the units of action). Several examples are given.