Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The decomposability number of a von Neumann algebra $\mathcal{M}$ (denoted by
$\text{dec}\left( \mathcal{M} \right)$ ) is the greatest cardinality of a family of pairwise orthogonal non-zero projections in
$\mathcal{M}$ . In this paper, we explore the close connection between
$\text{dec}\left( \mathcal{M} \right)$ and the cardinal level of the Mazur property for the predual
${{\mathcal{M}}_{*}}$ of
$\mathcal{M}$ , the study of which was initiated by the second author. Here, our main focus is on those von Neumann algebras whose preduals constitute such important Banach algebras on a locally compact group
$G$ as the group algebra
${{L}_{1}}(G)$ , the Fourier algebra
$A(G)$ , the measure algebra
$M(G)$ , the algebra
$LUC{{(G)}^{*}}$ , etc. We show that for any of these von Neumann algebras, say
$\mathcal{M}$ , the cardinal number dec
$(\mathcal{M})$ and a certain cardinal level of the Mazur property of
${{\mathcal{M}}_{*}}$ are completely encoded in the underlying group structure. In fact, they can be expressed precisely by two dual cardinal invariants of
$G$ : the compact covering number
$\kappa (G)$ of
$G$ and the least cardinality
$\mathcal{X}(G)$ of an open basis at the identity of
$G$ . We also present an application of the Mazur property of higher level to the topological centre problem for the Banach algebra
$A{{(G)}^{**}}$ .