A characterization of fullness of continuous cores of type III$_1$ free product factors

Abstract: We prove that, for any type III$_1$ free product factor, its continuous core is full if and only if its $\tau$-invariant is the usual topology on the real line. This trivially implies, as a particular case, the same result for free Araki--Woods factors. Moreover, our method shows the same result for full (generalized) Bernoulli crossed product factors of type III$_1$.