Free products of lattice ordered groups (Q5896408)

This paper gives a rather complete account of what is known about free products in varieties \({\mathcal L}\) of lattice-ordered groups \((=\ell\)- groups) including a great deal of original results. In the first two sections, free products are described in the variety of abelian, representable, and all \(\ell\)-groups, respectively. Next, the failure of the amalgamation property in a great number of varieties of \(\ell\)-groups is shown, although this property holds in the variety of abelian \(\ell\)- groups. The same is true for the property of embeddability in a divisible \(\ell\)-group in the same variety. Further results concern the cardinality of disjoint sets and of chains in \({\mathcal L}\)-free (products of) \(\ell\)- groups. Also the direct indecomposability of \({\mathcal L}\)-free products is proved under rather weak hypotheses. A long list of challenging open problems concludes the paper.