The structure of abelian pro-Lie groups (Q706126): Difference between revisions

This paper can be considered as a continuation of a recent article of the same authors [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. 87, 647--676 (2003; Zbl 1037.22041)] (where they proved that the class of pro-Lie groups coincides with the class of groups G which are projective limits of finite dimensional Lie groups). Here, the authors apply their previous results to the study of Abelian pro-Lie groups. This class of topological abelian groups contains the class of locally compact abelian groups and, in contrast with the latter, is closed under the formation of products and closed subgroups. Thus, the interest of this paper lies in the fact that it provides a description of the topological-algebraic structure of abelian pro-Lie groups in the line of what is known for locally compact abelian groups. Firstly, several examples of different abelian pro-Lie groups are shown to illustrate the difficulties which appear in order to obtain a good classification of these groups. The main result in the paper summarizes what is done in the first sections and goes as follows: Let \(G\) be an abelian pro-Lie group and \(V\) a vector group complement (which is proved to exist for each abelian pro-Lie group \(G\)). Then there is a closed subgroup \(H\) such that (i) \((v,h)\mapsto v+h:V\times H \rightarrow G\) is an isomorphism of topological groups; (ii) the connected component \(H_0\) (of \(H\)) is compact and equals comp\((G_0)\) and \(\text{comp}(H)= \text{comp}(G)\); in particular, \(\text{comp}(G)\subset H\); (iii) \(H/H_0\cong G/G_0\), and this group is discrete; (iv) \(G/ \text{comp}(G) \cong V\times S\) for some protodiscrete abelian group without nontrivial compact subgroups; (v) \(G\) has a characteristic closed subgroup \(G_1=G_0 \text{comp}(G)\) which is isomorphic to \(V\times \text{comp}(H)\) such that \(G/G_1\) is prodiscrete without nontrivial compact subgroups; (vi) the exponential function \(\exp_G\) of \(G=V\oplus H\) decomposes as \( \exp_G=\exp_V\oplus \exp_H\) where \(\exp_V:{\mathcal L}(V) \rightarrow V\) is an isomorphism of weakly complete vector groups and \(\exp_H=\exp_{\text{comp}(G_0)}: \mathcal{L}(\text{comp}(G_0))\rightarrow \text{comp}(G_0)\) is the exponential function of the unique largest compact connected subgroup; here \(\mathcal{L}(\text{comp} (G_0))= \text{comp}(\mathcal{L})(G)\) is the set of relatively compact one-parameter subgroups of \(G\); (vii) the arc component \(G_a\) of \(G\) is \(V\oplus H_a=V\oplus \text{comp}(G_0)_a = im~\mathcal{L}(G)\); moreover, if \({\Theta}\) is a closed vector subspace of \(\mathcal{L}(G)\) such that \(\exp(\Theta) = G_a\), then \(\Theta = \mathcal{L}(G)\). This result completely clarifies the structure of many pro-Lie abelian groups and, in general, reduces the more subtle problems on the structure of \(G\) to its prodiscrete factor \(G/G_1\). In the last part of the paper some applications are given to study some properties of abelian pro-discrete groups. Among other results, it is proved that a compactly generated abelian pro-Lie group \(G\) has a characteristic almost connected locally compact subgroup (namely, \(G_1\)) which is a product of a finite number of copies of the reals and a compact abelian group such that the factor group modulo this characteristic subgroup is a compactly generated prodiscrete group without nontrivial compact subgroups.