Strongly summable ultrafilters on abelian groups (Q1308148)

As stated in its abstract, this paper is mainly devoted to establish several facts about strongly summable ultrafilters on countable Abelian groups that were previously known in some particular cases, such as Boolean groups or the group \({\mathbb Z}\) of the integers. Let us recall that, given a commutative semigroup \(G\), an ultrafilter \(p \in \beta G\) is called strongly summable if it is generated by sets of finite sums. A trivial example of a strongly summable ultrafilter is then the principal ultrafilter which has \(\{0\}\) as a member. Section 3 of the paper under review shows that the existence of a nonprincipal strongly summable ultrafilter on a countable Abelian group \(G\) implies the existence of a \(P\)-point in \({\mathbb N}^{\ast }\) and is thus undecidable in ZFC. Section 2 shows however that Martin's Axiom implies the existence of such ultrafilters on every countable Abelian group \(G\). Analogous results can be deduced from \textit{A. Blass} and \textit{N. Hindman} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 304, 83-99 (1987; Zbl 0643.03032)] when \(G={\mathbb Z}\) and from \textit{V. Malykhin} [Soviet Math., Dokl. 16, 21-25 (1975; Zbl 0322.22003)] when \(G\) is Boolean. The last section of the paper centers around the uniqueness of the solutions of equations involving strongly summable ultrafilters. It is proved, for instance, that the equations \(p+x=p\) and \(x+p=p\) have only one solution when \(p\) is a strongly summable ultrafilter and \(G\) is embeddable in the circle group.