INVERSE SEMIGROUP ACTIONS ON GROUPOIDS ALCIDES BUSS AND RALF MEYER Abstract. We define inverse semigroup actions on topological groupoids by partial equivalences. From such actions, we construct saturated Fell bundles over inverse semigroups and non-Hausdorff étale groupoids. We interpret these as actions on C∗-algebras by Hilbert bimodules and describe the section alge- bras of these Fell bundles. Our constructions give saturated Fell bundles over non-Hausdorff étale groupoids that model actions on locally Hausdorff spaces. We show that these Fell bundles are usually not Morita equivalent to an action by automorphisms. That is, the Packer–Raeburn Stabilisation Trick does not generalise to non- Hausdorff groupoids. Contents 1. Introduction 2 2. Partial equivalences 4 3. Inversesemigroupactionsongroupoids 11 3.1. Compatibility with order and involution 14 3.2. Transformation groupoids 18 3.3. Examples:groupactionsandactionsonspaces 20 3.4. Morita invariance of actions by partial equivalences 23 3.5. Local centralisers 25 3.6. DecomposingproperLiegroupoids 26 4. Inverse semigroup actions on C∗-algebras 27 5. Fell bundles from actions of inverse semigroups 31 5.1. AHaarsystemonthetransformationgroupoid 32 5.2. Construction of the Fell bundle 32 5.3. Another construction of the Fell bundle 35 6. Actions of inverse semigroups and groupoids 36 6.1. The motivating example 38 6.2. Inverse semigroup models for étale groupoids 40 7. Actions by automorphisms are not enough 43 arXiv:1410.2051v5 [math.OA] 9 Jan 2017 8. A simple explicit example 44 Appendix A. Preliminaries on topological groupoids 46 A.1. Topological groupoids, principal bundles, and equivalences 47 A.2. Basicactionsversusfreeandproperactions 49 A.3. Covering groupoids and equivalence 50 Appendix B. Fields of Banach spaces over locally Hausdorff spaces 53 B.1. Proof of Theorem 5.5 56 References 57 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 46L55, 20M18, 22A22. Key words and phrases. Inverse semigroups, groupoids, actions, partial equivalences, Fell bun- dles, stabilisation trick. Supported by CNPq/CsF (Brazil) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungs- gemeinschaft (DFG)) through the grant “Actions of 2-groupoids on C*-algebras.” 1 2 ALCIDES BUSS AND RALF MEYER 1. Introduction Two of the most obvious actions of a groupoid G are those by left and right translations on its arrow space G1. If G is Hausdorff, they induce continuous ∗ 1 actions of G on the C -algebra C0(G ). What happens if G is non-Hausdorff? Let G be a non-Hausdorff, étale groupoid with Hausdorff, locally compact object 0 1 space G . Then G is locally Hausdorff, that is, it has an open covering U = (Ui)i∈I by Hausdorff subsets: we may choose Ui so that the range and source maps restrict 0 to homeomorphisms from Ui onto open subsets of the Hausdorff space G . The covering U yields an étale, locally compact, Hausdorff groupoid H with 0 1 object space H := i∈I Ui, arrow space H := i,j∈I Ui ∩ Uj , range and source maps r(i, j, x) := (i, xF) and s(i, j, x) := (j, x), andF multiplication (i, j, x) · (j, k, x)= (i,k,x). The groupoid H is known as the Čech groupoid for the covering U. In noncommutative geometry, we view the groupoid C∗-algebra C∗(H) as the algebra of functions on the non-Hausdorff space G1. Is there some kind of action of G on C∗(H) that corresponds to the translation action of G on G1? There is no action of G on C∗(H) in the usual sense because there is no action of G on H by automorphisms. The problem is that arrows g ∈ G1 have many 0 liftings (i,g) ∈ H . To let g ∈ G act on H, we must choose k ∈ I with gh ∈ Uk for h ∈ Uj with r(h)= s(g). It may, however, be impossible to choose k continuously when h varies in Uj . This article introduces actions by partial equivalences in order to make sense of the actions of G on H and C∗(H). At first, we replace G by its inverse semigroup of bisections S = Bis(G). This inverse semigroup cannot act on H by partial groupoid isomorphisms for the same reasons as above. It does, however, act on H by partial equivalences because the equivalence class of H is independent of the covering (see also [16, Lemma 4.1]); thus partial homeomorphisms on G1 lift to partial equivalences of H in a canonical way. We will see that an S-action by partial equivalences on a Čech groupoid for a locally Hausdorff space Z is equivalent to an S-action on Z by partial homeomorphisms. Let S act on a groupoid H by partial equivalences. Then we build a transforma- tion groupoid H ⋊ S. Special cases of this construction are the groupoid of germs for an action of S on a space by partial homeomorphisms, the semidirect product for a group(oid) action on another group(oid) by automorphisms, and the linking groupoid of a single Morita–Rieffel equivalence. The original action is encoded in the transformation groupoid L := H ⋊ S and open subsets Lt ⊆ L with −1 ∗ 1 Lt · Lu = Ltu, Lt = Lt , Lt ∩ Lu = Lv, L = Lt v≤[t,u t[∈S and H = L1. We call such a family of subsets an S-grading on L with unit fibre H. Any S-graded groupoid is a transformation groupoid for an essentially unique action of S by partial equivalences on its unit fibre. This is a very convenient characteri- sation of actions by partial equivalences. An action of an inverse semigroup S on H by partial equivalences cannot induce, in general, an action of S on C∗(H) by partial automorphisms in the usual sense (as defined by Sieben [33]). But we do get an action by partial Morita–Rieffel equivalences, that is, by Hilbert bimodules. We show that actions of S by Hilbert bimodules are equivalent to (saturated) Fell bundles over S. Along the way, we also drastically simplify the definition of Fell bundles over inverse semigroups in [13]. Our approach clarifies in what sense a Fell bundle over an inverse semigroup is an “action” of the inverse semigroup on a C∗-algebra. In the end, we want an action of the groupoid G itself, not of the inverse semi- group Bis(G). For actions by automorphisms, Sieben and Quigg [28] characterise which actions of Bis(G) come from actions of G. We extend this characterisation to INVERSE SEMIGROUP ACTIONS ON GROUPOIDS 3 Fell bundles: a Fell bundle over Bis(G) comes from a Fell bundle over G if and only if the restriction of the action to idempotents in Bis(G) commutes with suprema of arbitrarily large subsets. This criterion only works for Bis(G) itself. In practice, we may want to “model” G by a smaller inverse semigroup S such that G0 ⋊ S =∼ G. We characterise which Fell bundles over such S come from Fell bundles over G. In particular, our action of Bis(G) on C∗(H) for the Čech groupoid associated to G1 does come from an action of G, so we get Fell bundles over G that describe the left and the right translation actions on G1. For these Fell bundles, we show ∗ 0 that the section C -algebras are Morita equivalent to C0(G ). More generally, for any principal G-bundle X → Z, the section algebra of the Fell bundle over G that describes the action of G on a Čech groupoid for X is Morita–Rieffel equivalent to C0(Z), just as in the more classical Hausdorff case (see Proposition 6.5). For any action of an inverse semigroup S on a locally compact groupoid H by partial equivalences, we identify the section C∗-algebra of the resulting Fell bundle over S with the groupoid C∗-algebra of the transformation groupoid. In brief notation, C∗(H) ⋊ S =∼ C∗(H ⋊ S). This generalises the well-known isomorphism ∗ C0(X) ⋊ S =∼ C (X ⋊ S) for inverse semigroup actions on Hausdorff locally compact spaces by partial home- omorphisms. For a Hausdorff locally compact groupoid, any Fell bundle is equivalent to an ordinary action on a stabilisation (Packer–Raeburn Stabilisation Trick, see also [6, Proposition 5.2]). In contrast, our Theorem 7.1 shows that a non-Hausdorff groupoid has no action by automorphisms that describes its translation action on G1. Thus we really need Fell bundles to treat these actions of a non-Hausdorff groupoid. Now we explain the results of the individual sections of the paper. In Section 2, we study partial equivalences between topological groupoids. We show, in particular, that the involution that exchanges the left and right actions on a partial equivalence behaves like the involution in an inverse semigroup. Section 3 introduces inverse semigroup actions by partial equivalences. We show that the rather simple-minded definition implies further structure, which is needed to construct the transformation groupoid. Once we know that actions by partial equivalences are essentially the same as S-graded groupoids, we treat many exam- ples. This includes actions on spaces and Čech groupoids; in particular, an S-action on a space by partial homeomorphisms induces an action by partial equivalences on any Čech groupoid for a covering of the space. We describe a group action by (par- tial) equivalences as a kind of extension by the group. We show that any (locally) proper Lie groupoid is a transformation groupoid for an inverse semigroup action on a very simple kind of groupoid: a disjoint union of transformation groupoids of the form V ⋊ K, where V is a vector space, K a compact Lie group, and the K-action on V is by an R-linear representation.