This material has been published in Adv. in Math. 200 (2006), 479-524, the only definitive repository of the content that has been certified and accepted after peer review. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by Elsevier B.V. This material may not be copied or reposted without explicit permission.

Christian Brouder, Alessandra Frabetti and Christian Krattenthaler

Non-commutative Hopf algebra of formal diffeomorphisms

(32 pages)

Abstract. This paper deals with two Hopf algebras which are the non-commutative analogues of two different groups of formal power series. The first group is the set of invertible series with the group law being multiplication of series, while the second group is the set of formal diffeomorphisms with the group law being composition of series. The motivation to introduce these Hopf algebras comes from the study of formal series with non-commutative coefficients. Invertible series with non-commutative coefficients still form a group, and we interpret the corresponding new non-commutative Hopf algebra as an alternative to the natural Hopf algebra given by the co-ordinate ring of the group, which has the advantage of being functorial in the algebra of coefficients. For the formal diffeomorphisms with non-commutative coefficients, this interpretation fails, because in this case the composition is not associative anymore. However, we show that for the dual non-commutative algebra there exists a natural co-associative co-product defining a non-commutative Hopf algebra. Moreover, we give an explicit formula for the antipode, which represents a non-commutative version of the Lagrange inversion formula, and we show that its coefficients are related to planar binary trees. Then we extend these results to the semi-direct co-product of the previous Hopf algebras, and to series in several variables. Finally, we show how the non-commutative Hopf algebras of formal series are related to some renormalization Hopf algebras, which are combinatorial Hopf algebras motivated by the renormalization procedure in quantum field theory, and to the renormalization functor given by the double tensor algebra on a bi-algebra.


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