Colour Algebras over Rings

Colour algebras are noncommutative Jordan algebras and closely related to octonion algebras. They initially emerged in physics since the multiplication of a colour algebra over the real or complex numbers describes the colour symmetry of the Gell–Mann quark model. Over fields of characteristic not equal to two, their structure is now well-known. We initiate the study of colour algebras over a unital commutative base ring R where two is an invertible element, and show when colour algebras can be constructed canonically by employing nondegenerate ternary hermitian forms with trivial determinant. We investigate their structure, their automorphism group and their derivations. We show that there is again a close connection between the colour algebras obtained from hermitian forms and certain types of octonion algebras.