Reflexivity of prodiscrete topological groups (Q719564)

The authors study duality theory for certain classes of abelian protodiscrete groups. A protodiscrete group is a topological group that has a neighbourhood base at the identity consisting of open normal subgroups. An important class of abelian protodiscrete groups is given by abelian P-groups: a topological group is a P-group if countable intersections of open sets are themselves open. \textit{H. Leptin} [Abh. Math. Semin. Univ. Hamb. 19, 264--268 (1955; Zbl 0065.01502)] gave an example of an abelian P-group that is not reflexive (i.e., \(G\widehat{\phantom x}\,\widehat{\phantom x}\not\cong G\)). The first example of a non-discrete abelian P-group that is reflexive is due to the authors [Topology Appl. 158, 194--203 (2011; Zbl 1208.22002)]: take an uncountable product \(G = \prod_{i\in I} G_i\) of non-trivial abelian groups and endow that with the topology that has a base at the identity consisting of the sets of the form \(\{(x_i)\); \(x_i=0_i\) for \(i\in J\}\) where \(|J|\leq\aleph_0\). The results in the paper under review give a lot more examples of reflexive P-groups, including non-complete ones. Every topological group can be modified to a P-group (with the obvious change of topology), and the authors show that the P-modifications of a large class of abelian groups (so-called pseudo-feathered groups) are always reflexive. In particular, the P-modification of every locally compact abelian group is reflexive. There are many other results related to P-groups and reflexivity. The authors also give a class of examples of non-reflexive abelian prodiscrete (i.e., complete protodiscrete) groups with countable pseudocharacter. It is known that every metrizable prodiscrete group is reflexive, so this result shows that metrizability cannot be weakened to the property of having countable pseudocharacter. The paper ends with a long list of open problems.