Decomposition of topological Azumaya algebras

Abstract

Abstract Let $\mathscr {A}$ be a topological Azumaya algebra of degree $mn$ over a CW complex X. We give conditions for the positive integers m and n, and the space X so that $\mathscr {A}$ can be decomposed as the tensor product of topological Azumaya algebras of degrees m and n. Then we prove that if $m<n$ and the dimension of X is higher than $2m+1$ , $\mathscr {A}$ may not have such decomposition.