Many Q-Particles from One: A New Approach to *-Hopf Algebras?

We propose a nonstandard approach to solving the apparent incompatibility between the coalgebra structure of some inhomogeneous quantum groups and their natural complex conjugation. In this work we sketch the general idea and develop the method in detail on a toy-model; the latter is a q-deformation of the Hopf algebra of 1-dim translations + dilatations. We show how to get all Hilbert space representations of the latter from tensor products of the fundamental ones; physically, this corresponds to constructing composite systems of many free distinct q-particles in terms of the basic one-particle ones. The spectrum of the total momentum turns out to be the same as that of a one-particle momentum, i.e. of the form $\{\mu q^n\}_{n\in\zn}$.