Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2015
We prove that, under rather general conditions, the 1-cohomology of a von Neumann algebra $M$ with values in a Banach
$M$ -bimodule satisfying a combination of smoothness and operatorial conditions vanishes. For instance, we show that, if
$M$ acts normally on a Hilbert space
${\mathcal{H}}$ and
${\mathcal{B}}_{0}\subset {\mathcal{B}}({\mathcal{H}})$ is a norm closed
$M$ -bimodule such that any
$T\in {\mathcal{B}}_{0}$ is smooth (i.e., the left and right multiplications of
$T$ by
$x\in M$ are continuous from the unit ball of
$M$ with the
$s^{\ast }$ -topology to
${\mathcal{B}}_{0}$ with its norm), then any derivation of
$M$ into
${\mathcal{B}}_{0}$ is inner. The compact operators are smooth over any
$M\subset {\mathcal{B}}({\mathcal{H}})$ , but there is a large variety of non-compact smooth elements as well.