Pure ⁎-homomorphisms

We introduce and study the notion of pureness for *-homomorphisms and, more generally, for cpc order-zero maps. After providing various important examples of pureness, we show our main result: Any composition of two pure maps factors through a pure object up to Cuntz equivalence. This is used to obtain several factorization results at the level of $C^{⁎}$-algebras.