A Reflexive Admissible Topological Group must be Locally Compact

Abstract

Let G be a reflexive topological group, and Gits group of characters, endowed with the compact open topology. We prove that the evaluation mapping from Gx G into the torus T is continuous if and only if G is locally compact. This is an analogue of a well-known theorem of Arens on admissible topologies on C(X) . DEFINITIONS AND REMARKS Let X, Y be topological spaces, and let Z be a subset of yX . A topology on Z is said to be admissible if the evaluation mapping from the product Z x X into Y, defined by w(f, x) = f(x), is continuous. Let (S, V) = {f E Z; f(S) C V}. The family {(S, V)}, where S runs over the collection of all compact subsets of X and V runs over a basis of open sets in Y, is a subbase for the compact open topology on Z. An admissible topology on Z must be finer than the compact open topology [8]. A result of Arens states that the existence of a coarsest admissible topology for the class of real continuous functions on a completely regular space X is equivalent to X being locally compact [1]. In this paper we are interested in reflexive topological groups. Answering in the negative a question of Megrelishvili [7], we will see that the evaluation map for those groups need not be continuous. In fact, as specified in the theorem, the continuity of the evaluation characterizes locally compact Hausdorff abelian groups among reflexive groups. We prove this result by means of convergence spaces. For an account of theory of convergence spaces the reader is referred to [3, 4]. We only give here needed definitions. Let G be a Hausdorff topological abelian group, and let FG be the set of all continuous homomorphisms from G into the unidimensional torus T. If addition is defined pointwise in FG, it becomes an abelian group. The continuous Received by the editors October 5, 1993 and, in revised form, April 25, 1994; the contents of this paper were presented to the First Ibero-American Conference on Topology and its Applications in Benicassim, Spain, on March 28-30, 1995. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 22A05.