Motivated by the representation theory of quivers with potential introduced by Derksen, Weyman and Zelevinsky and by work of Caldero and Chapoton, who gave explicit formulae for the cluster variables of Dynkin quivers, we associate a Caldero-Chapoton algebra AΛ to any (possibly infinite dimensional) basic algebra Λ. By definition, AΛ is (as a vector space) generated by the Caldero-Chapoton functions CΛ(M) of the decorated representations M of Λ. If Λ = P(Q, W ) is the Jacobian algebra defined

more »

... a 2-acyclic quiver Q with non-degenerate potential W , then we have AQ ⊆ AΛ ⊆ A up Q , where AQ and A up Q are the cluster algebra and the upper cluster algebra associated to Q. The set BΛ of generic Caldero-Chapoton functions is parametrized by the strongly reduced components of the varieties of representations of the Jacobian algebra P(Q, W ) and was introduced by Geiss, Leclerc and Schröer. Plamondon parametrized the strongly reduced components for finite-dimensional basic algebras. We generalize this to arbitrary basic algebras. Furthermore, we prove a decomposition theorem for strongly reduced components. We define BΛ for arbitrary Λ, and we conjecture that BΛ is a basis of the Caldero-Chapoton algebra AΛ. Thanks to the decomposition theorem, all elements of BΛ can be seen as generalized cluster monomials. As another application, we obtain a new proof for the sign-coherence of g-vectors. Caldero-Chapoton algebras lead to several general conjectures on cluster algebras. Contents 24 9. Examples 25 References 32