Characterizing subgroups of compact Abelian groups (Q856349)

A subgroup \(H\) of an Abelian topological group \(G\) is said to have a characterizing set, or simply to be characterizable, if there exists a countably infinite set \(B\) of continuous characters on \(G\) such that \(H\) is the set of all elements \(x\in G\) for which \(B(x)\) converges to zero in the circle group \({\mathbb T}.\) The main result in this paper (Theorem 1.4) asserts that if \(G\) is compact metrizable and \(H\) is countably infinite, then \(H\) has a characterizing set. From this theorem, a number of interesting results on characterizable subgroups are derived, which solve some problems posed in earlier publications on this subject: The Bohr modification of a maximally almost periodic group \(G\) has countable pseudocharacter if and only if every (equivalently, some) countable subgroup of \(G\) is characterizable (Corollary 1.6); every countably infinite subgroup of a compact Abelian group is the intersection of all characterizable subgroups which contain it (Corollary 1.9); every totally bounded metrizable group topology on a countable Abelian group \(G\) is the finest totally bounded group topology on \(G\) for which a convenient sequence converges to zero (Corollary 1.11). Besides this, a more general criterion of characterizability is provided (Theorem 5): if a subgroup \(H\) of a compact Abelian group is the union of a strictly increasing sequence \((F_n)\) of closed subgroups, then \(H\) is characterizable if and only if there exists \(m\in {\mathbb N}\) for which \(G/F_m\) is metrizable and \(| F_{n+1}:F_n| \) is finite for \(n\geq m.\)