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Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to generalize the classical flow under a function construction to non-abelian W*-algebras. We obtain existence and uniqueness theorems for this generalization. As an application we show that the relationship between a continuous and a discrete decomposition of a properly infinite W*-algebra is that of generalized flow under a function. Since continuous decompositions are known to exist for any properly infinite W*-algebra, this leads to generalizations of Connes' results on discrete decomposition.