Pontryagin-van Kampen reflexivity for free Abelian topological groups (Q4256536)

The theory of locally compact abelian groups is centered around Pontryagin duality: every group in this class is in a canonical way (via the evaluation map) isomorphic to the dual of its dual (the group of all continuous homomorphisms to the circle group). A group with this property is called \(P\)-reflexive. There are larger classes of topological groups satisfying Pontryagin duality, including the class of all real Banach spaces, or of all reflexive locally convex real vector spaces. For free Abelian topological groups, several necessary or sufficient conditions for P-reflexivity are known, see [\textit{V. Pestov}, Bull. Aust. Math. Soc. 52, 297-311 (1995; Zbl 0841.22001)] and the references given there. In the paper under review, a class of topological spaces is singled out that allows to give a necessary and sufficient topological condition on an element \(X\) of this class for the free Abelian topological group \(A(X)\) to be P-reflexive. For technical reasons, the authors concentrate on \(\mu\)-spaces (where every functionally bounded subset is relatively compact). A space \(X\) is called an Ascoli space if the space of all continuous maps from \(X\) to the circle (with the compact-open topology) allows the following characterization of compact subsets: a subset is compact iff it is closed, equicontinuous, and compact in the point-open topology. The main result (Theorem 4.5) asserts that, for a \(\mu\)-space \(X\), the free Abelian topological group \(A(X)\) is \(P\)-reflexive if and only if the space \(X\) is punctiform (no compact connected subspace has more than one point) and an Ascoli space. Several consequences of this result are listed. The authors remark that there is some overlap with results obtained in a recent doctoral dissertation [\textit{L. Außenhofer}, Contributions to the duality theory of Abelian topological groups and to the theory of nuclear groups. Univ. Tübingen, Math. Fakultät (1998; Zbl 0905.22001)].