From a single chain to a large family of submodules (Q1888643)

From the paper: In this note all groups are abelian, and all modules are unital over a commutative ring \(R\) with 1. Suppose that a module \(M\) (over any ring) has a continuous well-ordered ascending chain \(0= M_0<M_1<\cdots<M_\alpha<\cdots <\bigcup_{\alpha<\tau}M_\alpha= M\) \((\alpha<\tau)\) of submodules \(M_\alpha\) which are assumed to have prescribed properties. Here ``continuous chain'' means that for every limit ordinal \(\beta<\tau\), \(M_\beta=\bigcup_{\alpha<\beta} M_\alpha\) holds. Can we find a large collection of submodules in \(M\) with the same properties? The answer to this above question is that in certain cases we can find a large collection of submodules with the same properties -- as was demonstrated by \textit{P. Hill} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 82, 347--350 (1981; Zbl 0467.20041)]. He gave an interesting construction showing how to create from a chain of `nice' subgroups in an abelian torsion group a large collection of `nice' subgroups (here `nice' has a well-defined meaning, see section 4). This idea has been applied to several other situations. In the present note, we imitate Hill's method in a fairly general setting and, starting from a given continuous chain, we construct a large collection of submodules such that the submodules in the collection will admit the same kind of continuous chains. We list several (old and new) applications of our construction to various modules and abelian groups.