Direct limits and maximality of stable planes (Q1580902)

Taking (not necessarily locally compact) nondiscrete stable planes as objects and continuous open embeddings of stable planes as morphisms yields a category \textbf{StOP}. The main theorem of the paper under review asserts the existence of direct limits in \textbf{StOP}. A consequence of this result is the existence of open embeddings of stable planes into maximal ones. Here, a (nondiscrete) stable plane \(P\) is called maximal if every morphism with domain \(P\) already is an isomorphism. Stable projective planes provide examples, but not every maximal stable plane is projective. Another application of the main result deals with embeddings of action of semigroups into action of groups: Define a preorder on \(E := \text{End}_{\mathbf{ {StOP}}}(P)\) by \(\phi \leq \psi :\Leftrightarrow \exists \pi \in E : \phi\pi=\psi\). Let \(\Sigma\) be a subsemigroup of \(E\) such that \((\Sigma,\leq)\) is a directed system; this property is guaranteed if \(\Sigma\) is commutative. Using a direct limit construction, the authors show the existence of a \textbf{StOP}-morphism \(\pi : P \rightarrow Q\) and an injective homomorphism \(\varepsilon : \Sigma \rightarrow \text{Aut}_{\mathbf{ {StOP}}} (Q)\) such that \(\pi\sigma^\varepsilon = \sigma\pi\) holds for every \(\sigma \in \Sigma\). In particular, if \(\sigma\) is an endomorphism of \(P\), then there is an open embedding of \(P\) into a stable plane \(Q\) such that \(\sigma\) extends to an automorphism of \(Q\).