Amenable absorption in amalgamated free product von Neumann algebras

Abstract: We investigate the position of amenable subalgebras in arbitrary amalgamated free product von Neumann algebras $M = M_1 \ast_B M_2$. Our main result states that under natural analytic assumptions, any amenable subalgebra of $M$ that has a large intersection with $M_1$ is actually contained in $M_1$. The proof does not rely on Popa's asymptotic orthogonality property but on the study of non normal conditional expectations.