Fatou's theorem for non-commutative measures

Abstract

A classical theorem of Fatou asserts that the Radon–Nikodym derivative of any finite and positive Borel measure, μ, with respect to Lebesgue measure on the complex unit circle, is recovered as the non-tangential limits of its Poisson transform in the complex unit disk. This positive harmonic Poisson transform is the real part of an analytic function whose Taylor coefficients are in fixed proportion to the conjugate moments of μ.Replacing Taylor series in one variable by power series in several non-commuting variables, we show that Fatou's Theorem and related results have natural extensions to the setting of positive harmonic functions in an open unit ball of several non-commuting matrix-variables, and a corresponding class of positive non-commutative (NC) measures. Here, an NC measure is any positive linear functional on a certain self-adjoint unital subspace of the Cuntz–Toeplitz algebra, the C⁎−algebra generated by the left creation operators on the full Fock space.