Representations of groups on Banach spaces

We establish a general framework for representability of a metric group on a (well-behaved) class of Banach spaces. More precisely, let G \mathcal {G} be a topological group, and A \mathcal {A} a unital symmetric C ∗ C^* -subalgebra of U C ( G ) \mathrm {UC}(\mathcal {G}) , the algebra of bounded uniformly continuous functions on G \mathcal {G} . Generalizing the notion of a stable metric, we study A \mathcal {A} -metrics δ \delta , i.e., the function δ ( e , ⋅ ) \delta (e, \cdot ) belongs to A \mathcal {A} ; the case A = W A P ( G ) \mathcal {A}=W\hskip -0.7mm A\hskip -0.2mm P(\mathcal {G}) , the algebra of weakly almost periodic functions on G \mathcal {G} , recovers stability. If the topology of G G is induced by a left invariant metric d d , we prove that A \mathcal {A} determines the topology of G \mathcal {G} if and only if d d is uniformly equivalent to a left invariant A \mathcal {A} -metric. As an application, we show that the additive group of C [ 0 , 1 ] C[0,1] is not reflexively representable; this is a new proof of Megrelishvili [Topological transformation groups: selected topics, Elsevier, 2007, Question 6.7] (the problem was already solved by Ferri and Galindo [Studia Math. 193 (2009), pp. 99–108] with different methods and later the results were generalized by Yaacov, Berenstein, and Ferri [Math. Z. 267 (2011), pp.129–138]). Let now G \mathcal {G} be a metric group, and assume A ⊆ L U C ( G ) \mathcal {A}\subseteq \mathrm {LUC}(\mathcal {G}) , the algebra of bounded left uniformly continuous functions on G \mathcal {G} , is a unital C ∗ C^* -algebra which is the uniform closure of coefficients of representations of G \mathcal {G} on members of F \mathscr {F} , where F \mathscr {F} is a class of Banach spaces closed under ℓ 2 \ell _2 -direct sums. We prove that A \mathcal {A} determines the topology of G \mathcal {G} if and only if G \mathcal {G} embeds into the isometry group of a member of F \mathscr {F} , equipped with the weak operator topology. As applications, we obtain characterizations of unitary and reflexive representability.