No Arabic abstract
We present a contribution to the structure theory of locally compact groups. The emphasis is on compactly generated locally compact groups which admit no infinite discrete quotient. It is shown that such a group possesses a characteristic cocompact subgroup which is either connected or admits a non-compact non-discrete topologically simple quotient. We also provide a description of characteristically simple groups and of groups all of whose proper quotients are compact. We show that Noetherian locally compact groups without infinite discrete quotient admit a subnormal series with all subquotients compact, compactly generated Abelian, or compactly generated topologically simple. Two appendices introduce results and examples around the concept of quasi-product.
We announce various results concerning the structure of compactly generated simple locally compact groups. We introduce a local invariant, called the structure lattice, which consists of commensurability classes of compact subgroups with open normaliser, and show that its properties reflect the global structure of the ambient group.
The purpose of this survey is to describe how locally compact groups can be studied as geometric objects. We will emphasize the main ideas and skip or just sketch most proofs, often referring the reader to our much more detailed book arXiv:1403.3796
We give some new characterizations of exactness for locally compact second countable groups. In particular, we prove that a locally compact second countable group is exact if and only if it admits a topologically amenable action on a compact Hausdorff space. This answers an open question by Anantharaman-Delaroche.
We introduce an obstruction to the existence of a coarse embedding of a given group or space into a hyperbolic group, or more generally into a hyperbolic graph of bounded degree. The condition we consider is admitting exponentially many fat bigons, and it is preserved by a coarse embedding between graphs with bounded degree. Groups with exponential growth and linear divergence (such as direct products of two groups one of which has exponential growth, solvable groups that are not virtually nilpotent, and uniform higher-rank lattices) have this property and hyperbolic graphs do not, so the former cannot be coarsely embedded into the latter. Other examples include certain lacunary hyperbolic and certain small cancellation groups.
It is shown that a closed solvable subgroup of a connected Lie group is compactly generated. In particular, every discrete solvable subgroup of a connected Lie group is finitely generated. Generalizations to locally compact groups are discussed as far as they carry.