Profinite groups with many commuting pairs or involutions (Q1580893)

The main result of the paper is Theorem 1. Let \(G\) be a profinite group such that for some constant \(\varepsilon>0\) the set of commuting pairs of elements of \(G\) has (normalized) Haar measure \(>\varepsilon\). Then (i) the FC centre (i.e., the subgroup of elements with finite conjugacy classes) of \(G\) has index at most \(1/\varepsilon\); (ii) \(G\) has an open normal subgroup \(N\) of nilpotency class two such that \(|N'|\) and \(|G/N|\) are both bounded in terms of \(\varepsilon\); (iii) \(G\) is Abelian by finite. Using this the authors deduce the following result. Theorem 2. Let \(G\) be a profinite group whose subset of involutions \(I\) has positive Haar mesure. Then \(G\) is Abelian by finite and \(I\) contains an open subset. The authors conjecture that if the set \(\{g\in G\mid g^n=1\}\) for some natural \(n\) has positive Haar measure, then it contains an open subset of \(G\).