Ring-theoretic (in)finiteness in reduced products of Banach algebras

Abstract: We study ring-theoretic (in)finiteness properties -- such as \emph{Dedekind-finiteness} and \emph{proper infiniteness} -- of ultraproducts (and more generally, reduced products) of Banach algebras. Whilst we characterise when an ultraproduct has these ring-theoretic properties in terms of its underlying sequence of algebras, we find that, contrary to the $C<sup>*$-algebraic setting, it is not true in general that an ultraproduct has a ring-theoretic finiteness property if and only if "ultrafilter many" of the underlying sequence of algebras have the same property. This might appear to violate the continuous model theoretic counterpart of {\L}o\'s's Theorem; the reason it does not is that for a general Banach algebra, the ring theoretic properties we consider cannot be verified by considering a bounded subset of the algebra of \emph{fixed} bound. For Banach algebras, we construct counter-examples to show, for example, that each component Banach algebra can fail to be Dedekind-finite while the ultraproduct is Dedekind-finite, and we explain why such a counter-example is not possible for $C<sup>*$-algebras. Finally the related notion of having \textit{stable rank one} is also studied for ultraproducts.