Scattered products in fundamental groupoids

Abstract

Infinitary operations, such as products indexed by countably infinite linear orders, arise naturally in the context of fundamental groups and groupoids. We prove that the well-definedness of products indexed by a scattered linear order in the fundamental groupoid of a first countable space is equivalent to the homotopically Hausdorff property. To prove this characterization, we employ the machinery of closure operators, on the $\pi_1$-subgroup lattice, defined in terms of test maps from one-dimensional domains.