Countably compact group topologies on arbitrarily large free abelian groups (Q6044444)

The authors address a question first posed by D. Dikranjan and D. Shakhmatov in 1992, concerning the nature of (Hausdorff) group topologies on free abelian groups. They prove that given certain conditions on selective ultrafilters (the existence of continuum many pairwise incompatible selective ultrafilters), a group topology can be established on any free abelian group of cardinality \(\kappa = \kappa^\omega\) such that every finite power of it is countably compact and without non-trivial convergent sequences. This means that countably compact groups may exist for unbounded cardinalities. Historically, Tomita, Tkachenko, and others made strides in this direction, with Tomita showing that free abelian groups do not admit compact Hausdorff group topologies or even countably compact group topologies for their countable power. Yet, when endowed with certain properties under the Continuum Hypothesis, free abelian groups can have countably compact Hausdorff group topologies. Most known examples have their cardinalities bounded by cardinality of the power-set of the continuum. Building on previous works, the authors show that under the Generalised Continuum Hypothesis, a countably compact group topology (without non-trivial convergent sequences) may be defined on a free abelian group of cardinality \(\kappa\) if and only if \(\kappa = \kappa^\omega\). Moreover, the authors show the consistency of a proper class of cardinals of countable cofinality that can be weights of a countably compact free abelian groups.