The structure of abelian pro-Lie groups

Abstract

A pro-Lie group is a projective limit of a projective system of finite dimensional Lie groups. A prodiscrete group is a complete abelian topological group in which the open normal subgroups form a basis of the filter of identity neighborhoods. It is shown here that an abelian pro-Lie group is a product of (in general infinitely many) copies of the additive topological group of reals and of an abelian pro-Lie group of a special type; this last factor has a compact connected component, and a characteristic closed subgroup which is a union of all compact subgroups; the factor group modulo this subgroup is pro-discrete and free of nonsingleton compact subgroups. Accordingly, a connected abelian pro-Lie group is a product of a family of copies of the reals and a compact connected abelian group. A topological group is called compactly generated if it is algebraically generated by a compact subset, and a group is called almost connected if the factor group modulo its identity component is compact. It is further shown that a compactly generated abelian pro-Lie group has a characteristic almost connected locally compact subgroup which is a product of a finite number of copies of the reals and a compact abelian group such that the factor group modulo this characteristic subgroup is a compactly generated prodiscrete group without nontrivial compact subgroups.