ON THE STABILITY OF A FIXED POINT ALGEBRA C*(E)γ OF A GAUGE ACTION ON A GRAPH C*-ALGEBRA

The fixed point algebra $C^*(E)^{\gamma}$ of a gauge action $\gamma$ on a graph $C^*$-algebra $C^*(E)$ and its AF subalgebras $C^*(E)^{\gamma}_{\upsilon}$ associated to each vertex v do play an important role for the study of dynamical properties of $C^*(E)$. In this paper, we consider the stability of $C^*(E)^{\gamma}$ (an AF algebra is either stable or equipped with a (nonzero bounded) trace). It is known that $C^*(E)^{\gamma}$ is stably isomorphic to a graph $C^*$-algebra $C^*(E_{\mathbb{Z}}\;{\times}\;E)$ which we observe being stable. We first give an explicit isomorphism from $C^*(E)^{\gamma}$ to a full hereditary $C^*$-subalgebra of $C^*(E_{\mathbb{N}}\;{\times}\;E)({\subset}\;C^*(E_{\mathbb{Z}}\;{\times}\;E))$ and then show that $C^*(E_{\mathbb{N}}\;{\times}\;E)$ is stable whenever $C^*(E)^{\gamma}$ is so. Thus $C^*(E)^{\gamma}$ cannot be stable if $C^*(E_{\mathbb{N}}\;{\times}\;E)$ admits a trace. It is shown that this is the case if the vertex matrix of E has an eigenvector with an eigenvalue $\lambda$ > 1. The AF algebras $C^*(E)^{\gamma}_{\upsilon}$ are shown to be nonstable whenever E is irreducible. Several examples are discussed.