The purpose of the present paper is to lay the foundations for a systematic study of tensor products of operator systems. After giving an axiomatic definition of tensor products in this category, we examine in detail several particular examples of tensor products, including a minimal, maximal, maximal commuting, maximal injective and some asymmetric tensor products. We characterize these tensor products in terms of their universal properties and give descriptions of their positive cones. We also characterize the corresponding tensor products of operator spaces induced by a certain canonical inclusion of an operator space into an operator system. We examine notions of nuclearity for our tensor products which, on the category of C*-algebras, reduce to the classical notion. We exhibit an operator system S which is not completely order isomorphic to a C*-algebra yet has the property that for every C*-algebra A, the minimal and maximal tensor product of S and A are equal.

We continue our study of tensor products in the operator system category. We define operator system quotients and exactness in this setting and refine the notion of nuclearity by studying operator systems that preserve various pairs of tensor products. One of our main goals is to relate these refinements of nuclearity to the Kirchberg conjecture. In particular, we prove that the Kirchberg conjecture is equivalent to the statement that every operator system that is (min,er)-nuclear is also (el,c)-nuclear. We show that operator system quotients are not always equal to the corresponding operator space quotients and then study exactness of various operator system tensor products for the operator system quotient. We prove that an operator system is exact for the min tensor product if and only if it is (min,el)nuclear. We give many characterizations of operator systems that are (min,er)-nulcear, (el,c)nuclear, (min,el)-nulcear and (el,max)-nuclear. These characterizations involve operator system analogues of various properties from the theory of C*-algebras and operator spaces, including the WEP and LLP.

Given an Archimedean order unit space (V, V + , e), we construct a minimal operator system OMIN(V ) and a maximal operator system OMAX(V ), which are the analogues of the minimal and maximal operator spaces of a normed space. We develop some of the key properties of these operator systems and make some progress on characterizing when an operator system S is completely boundedly isomorphic to either OMIN(S) or to OMAX(S). We then apply these concepts to the study of entanglement breaking maps. We prove that for matrix algebras a linear map is completely positive from OMIN(Mn) to OMAX(Mm) if and only if it is entanglement breaking.

Abstract. We develop further the new versions of quantum chromatic numbers of graphs introduced by the first and fourth authors. We prove that the problem of computation of the commuting quantum chromatic number of a graph is solvable by an SDP algorithm and describe an hierarchy of variants of the commuting quantum chromatic number which converge to it. We introduce the tracial rank of a graph, a parameter that gives a lower bound for the commuting quantum chromatic number and parallels the projective rank, and prove that it is multiplicative. We describe the tracial rank, the projective rank and the fractional chromatic numbers in a unified manner that clarifies their connection with the commuting quantum chromatic number, the quantum chromatic number and the classical chromatic number, respectively. Finally, we present a new SDP algorithm that yields a parameter larger than the Lovász number and is yet a lower bound for the tracial rank of the graph.We determine the precise value of the tracial rank of an odd cycle.

Abstract. We undertake a detailed study of the sets of multiplicity in a second countable locally compact group G and their operator versions. We establish a symbolic calculus for normal completely bounded maps from the space B(L 2 (G)) of bounded linear operators on L 2 (G) into the von Neumann algebra VN(G) of G and use it to show that a closed subset E ⊆ G is a set of multiplicity if and only if the set E * = {(s, t) ∈ G × G : ts −1 ∈ E} is a set of operator multiplicity. Analogous results are established for M1-sets and M0-sets. We show that the property of being a set of multiplicity is preserved under various operations, including taking direct products, and establish an Inverse Image Theorem for such sets. We characterise the sets of finite width that are also sets of operator multiplicity, and show that every compact operator supported on a set of finite width can be approximated by sums of rank one operators supported on the same set. We show that, if G satisfies a mild approximation condition, pointwise multiplication by a given measurable function ψ : G → C defines a closable multiplier on the reduced C*-algebra C * r (G) of G if and only if Schur multiplication by the function N (ψ) : G × G → C, given by N (ψ)(s, t) = ψ(ts −1 ), is a closable operator when viewed as a densely defined linear map on the space of compact operators on L 2 (G). Similar results are obtained for multipliers on VN(G).