Phase Space Reduction of Star Products on Cotangent Bundles

In this paper we construct star products on Marsden-Weinstein reduced spaces in case both the original phase space and the reduced phase space are (symplectomorphic to) cotangent bundles. Under the assumption that the original cotangent bundle T*Q carries a symplectic structure of form $$\omega _{B_0 } = \omega _0 + \pi *B_0 $$ with B0 a closed two-form on Q, is equipped by the cotangent lift of a proper and free Lie group action on Q and by an invariant star product that admits a G-equivariant quantum momentum map, we show that the reduced phase space inherits from T*Q a star product. Moreover, we provide a concrete description of the resulting star product in terms of the initial star product on T*Q and prove that our reduction scheme is independent of the characteristic class of the initial star product. Unlike other existing reduction schemes we are thus able to reduce not only strongly invariant star products. Furthermore in this article, we establish a relation between the characteristic class of the original star product and the characteristic class of the reduced star product and provide a classification up to G-equivalence of those star products on $$(T*Q,\omega _{B_0 }),$$ which are invariant with respect to a lifted Lie group action. Finally, we investigate the question under which circumstances ‘quantization commutes with reduction’ and show that in our examples non-trivial restrictions arise.