Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Let $\alpha :\,G\,\curvearrowright \,M$ be a spatial action of a countable abelian group on a “spatial” von Neumann algebra
$M$ and let
$S$ be its unital subsemigroup with
$G\,=\,{{S}^{-1}}S$ . We explicitly compute the essential commutant and the essential fixed-points, modulo the Schatten
$p$ -class or the compact operators, of the
${{w}^{*}}$ -semicrossed product of
$M$ by
$S$ when
${{M}^{'}}$ contains no non-zero compact operators. We also prove a weaker result when
$M$ is a von Neumann algebra on a finite dimensional Hilbert space and
$\left( G,\,S \right)\,=\,\left( \mathbb{Z},\,{{\mathbb{Z}}_{+}} \right)$ , which extends a famous result due to Davidson (1977) for the classical analytic Toeplitz operators.