In this note we demonstrate an equivalent condition for bi-freeness, inspired by the well-known "vanishing of alternating centred moments" condition from free probability. We show that all products satisfying a centred condition on maximal monochromatic χ-intervals have vanishing moments if and only if the family of pairs of faces they come from is bi-free, and show that similar characterisations hold for the amalgamated and conditional settings. In addition, we construct a bi-free unitary Brownian motion and show that conjugation by this process asymptotically creates bi-freeness; these considerations lead to another characterisation of bi-free independence.
Introduction.Bi-free probability was introduced by Voiculescu in [14] as a generalisation of free probability studying simultaneously left and right actions of algebras on a reduced free product space. Voiculescu demonstrated that many notions from free probability generalise with appropriate care to this bi-free setting. In particular, [14] demonstrated the existence of bi-free cumulant polynomials but did not produce explicit formulae for them. Soon after, Mastnak and Nica in [9] proposed a family of cumulant functionals, which the author together with Nelson and Skoufranis in [5] showed to agree with those abstractly given by Voiculescu. In particular, [5] demonstrated that bi-freeness was equivalent to the vanishing of mixed cumulants.Since then, many more techniques from free probability have been generalised to the bi-free setting: bi-free partial transforms were studied in [8,10,12,15,16]; infinite divisibility and a bi-free Lévy-Hinčin formula in [6]; bi-matrix models in [11]; and so on. One major difficulty in generalising results to bi-free probability, however, has been that the condition defining bi-freeness is somewhat unwieldy. Free independence is equivalent to saying that alternating products of centred elements are themselves centred, but in bi-free probability it has been necessary to work either with cumulants (and hence compute the Möbius function for the lattice of bi-non-crossing partitions) or to compute moments through abstract bi-free products. In this note, we demonstrate an appropriate bi-free analogue of the freeness condition. We also examine the extension of these techniques to conditional bi-free probability as studied by Gu and Skoufranis [7], and to certain operator-valued bi-free settings as considered in [4,14].Moreover, we consider a bi-free analogue of Biane's free multiplicative Brownian motion, which is a free stochastic process that may be constructed as the solution to a free stochastic equation involving free (additive) Brownian motion, or as a limit of the Markov process arising from the heat semi-group on finite dimensional unitary matrices [2]. A free multiplicative Brownian motion U (t) converges in moments to a Haar unitary operator as t → ∞; we introduced bi-free multiplicative Brownian motion, a pair of stochastic processes which behave similarly and converge in moments to a bi-Haar unitary in the sense of [4]...