Bicategories of operator algebras and Poisson manifolds

N. P. Landsman

Published 2000-08-02, updated 2000-08-21Version 2

It is well known that rings are the objects of a bicategory, whose arrows are bimodules, composed through the bimodule tensor product. We give an analogous bicategorical description of C*-algebras, von Neumann algebras, Lie groupoids, symplectic groupoids, and Poisson manifolds. The upshot is that known definitions of Morita equivalence for any of these cases amount to isomorphism of objects in the pertinent bicategory.