On the topological structure of the Levi-Civita field

Abstract

Two topologies on the Levi-Civita field R will be studied: the valuation topology induced by the order on the field, and another weaker topology induced by a family of seminorms, which we will call weak topology. We show that each of the two topologies results from a metric on R , that the valuation topology is not a vector topology while the weak topology is, and that R is complete in the valuation topology while it is not in the weak topology. Then the properties of both topologies will be studied in details; in particular, we give simple characterizations of open, closed, and compact sets in both topologies.