The scale and tidy subgroups for endomorphisms of totally disconnected locally compact groups (Q2255283)

Let \(G\) be a totally disconnected locally compact group and \(\alpha:G\to G\) a continuous endomorphism. In this paper \(\alpha\) is studied through its action on the family \(\mathcal B(G)\) of all compact open subgroups of \(G\), which forms a base of the neighborhoods of \(e_G\) by a theorem of van Dantzig. Indeed, the \textit{scale} of \(\alpha\) is \[ s(\alpha)=\min\{[\alpha(U):\alpha(U)\cap U]:U\in\mathcal B(G)\}. \] This extends the same notion given by the author in previous papers, first for inner automorphisms and then for topological automorphisms of \(G\). Note that always \(s(\alpha)=1\) when \(G\) is compact. A subgroup \(U\in\mathcal B(G)\) is \textit{minimizing} for \(\alpha\) if the minimum in the definition of the scale is attained at \(U\), that is, \(s(\alpha)=[\alpha(U):\alpha(U)\cap U]\). Appropriately extending the so-called tidying procedure to the case of continuous endomorphisms, the author generalizes the structure theorem for minimizing subgroups, as follows. For \(U\in\mathcal B(G)\), let \[ U_+=\{x\in U:\exists \{x_n\}_{n\in\mathbb N}\subseteq U, x_0=x, \alpha(x_{n+1})=x_n \forall n\in\mathbb N\}, \] \[ U_{++}=\bigcup_{n\in\mathbb N}\alpha^n(U_+)\;\text{and}\;U_-=\bigcap_{n\in\mathbb N}\alpha^{-n}(U). \] Then \(U\in\mathcal B(G)\) is minimizing for \(\alpha\) if and only if \(U=U_+U_-\), the subgroup \(U_{++}\) is closed and the sequence \(\{[\alpha^{n+1}(U_+):\alpha^n(U_+)]\}_{n\in\mathbb N}\) is constant. Several properties of the scale, known for topological automorphisms, are extended to the general case. The same also occurs for the definition of various subgroups related to the scale function.