On Characters and Pure States of *-Algebras

It is easy to see that every character (i.e. unital *-homomorphism to the complex numbers) of a commutative unital associative *-algebra is a pure state (i.e. extreme point in the convex set of all normalized positive linear functionals). This article gives sufficient conditions for the converse to be true as well. In order to formulate these results together with similar ones, e.g. for locally convex *-algebras, the notion of an abstract O*-algebra (unital associative *-algebra with an order defined by positive linear functionals) is introduced. Many concepts and intermediary results discussed here also apply to the non-commutative case.