The center of quantum symmetric pair coideal subalgebras

The theory of quantum symmetric pairs as developed by the second author is based on coideal subalgebras of the quantized universal enveloping algebra for a semisimple Lie algebra. This paper investigates the center of these coideal subalgebras, proving that the center is a polynomial ring. A basis of the center is given in terms of a submonoid of the dominant integral weights.