Duality between compactness and discreteness beyond pontryagin duality

Abstract

One of the most striking results of Pontryagin’s duality theory is the duality between compact and discrete locally compact abelian groups. This duality also persists in part for objects associated with noncommutative topological groups. In particular, it is well known that the dual space of a compact topological group is discrete, while the dual space of a discrete group is quasicompact (i.e., it satisfies the finite covering theorem but is not necessarily Hausdorff). The converse of the former assertion is also true, whereas the converse of the latter is not (there are simple examples of nondiscrete locally compact solvable groups of height 2 whose dual spaces are quasicompact and non-Hausdorff (they are T 1 spaces)). However, in the class of locally compact groups all of whose irreducible unitary representations are finite-dimensional, a group is discrete if and only if its dual space is quasicompact (and is automatically a T 1 space). The proof is based on the structural theorem for locally compact groups all of whose irreducible unitary representations are finite-dimensional. Certain duality between compactness and discreteness can also be revealed in groups that are not necessarily locally compact but are unitarily, or at least reflexively, representable, provided that (in the simplest case) the irreducible representations of a group form a sufficiently large family and have jointly bounded dimensions. The corresponding analogs of compactness and discreteness cannot always be easily identified, but they are still duals of each other to some extent.