A note on Tortrat groups (Q1266796)

Tortrat groups have been introduced by \textit{P. Eisele} in his dissertation of 1990. They are defined as locally compact groups \(G\) for which any nonidempotent probability measure \(\lambda\) on \(G\) has the property that the closure \(\{g\lambda g^{-1}: g\in G\}\) does not admit an idempotent measure. The authors show that a connected Lie group is a Tortrat group if and only if for all \(g\in G\) the eigenvalues of Ad\(g\) are of absolute value 1. Moreover they achieve a remarkable structure result: For an almost connected locally compact group \(G\) the conditions that \(G\) is a Tortrat group or distal or noncontracting or of polynomial growth are all equivalent.