Countably compact topological group topologies on free Abelian groups from selective ultrafilters (Q876543)

A free ultrafilter \(p\) on the natural numbers \(\omega\) is called selective if for every partition \(\{ A_n : n \in \omega \}\) of \(\omega\), either one of the \(A_n\)'s belongs to \(p\) or there is a selector \(B \in p\) such that all \(B \cap A_n\) have at most one element. Two ultrafilters \(p\) and \(q\) are incomparable if there is no bijection \(f : \omega \to \omega\) such that \(\beta f (p) = q\) where \(\beta f : \beta\omega \to \beta\omega\) denotes the Stone-Čech extension of \(f\). A Wallace semigroup is a countably compact topological semigroup with two-sided cancellation which is not a topological group. The authors show that if there are \(\kappa = \kappa^\omega\) many incomparable selective ultrafilters on \(\omega\), then there exists a countably compact group topology without non-trivial convergent sequences on the free Abelian group of size \(\kappa\). As a consequence they obtain that the existence of \({\mathfrak{c}}\) many incomparable selective ultrafilters implies the existence of a Wallace semigroup. These results improve earlier results which used the continuum hypothesis CH or (a fragment of) Martin's Axiom MA as assumption, for MA implies the existence of \(2^{\mathfrak{c}}\) many incomparable selective ultrafilters, while the existence of \(2^{\mathfrak{c}}\) many incomparable selective ultrafilters is also consistent with the total failure of MA. Since it is consistent that there are no selective ultrafilters, the question of whether such group topologies exist in ZFC is still open.