The Zariski Topology on Homeomorphism groups
Abstract
The Zariski topology on a group G is the coarsest topology such that all sets of the form are open. Originally introduced by Bryant as the verbal topology, it serves as a fundamental tool for investigating the topological structure of infinite groups and is always a topology with continuous shifts and inversion. Since the Zariski topology is coarser than every Hausdorff group topology on G, it provides a natural starting point for topologizing groups; specifically, for countable or abelian groups, it is known that the Zariski topology coincides with the Markov topology-the intersection of all Hausdorff group topologies on G. In this paper, we analyze the Zariski topology on various homeomorphism groups. We demonstrate that for the Thompson groups F and T, the Zariski (and thus Markov) topology coincides with the standard compact-open topology derived from their respective actions on and . In contrast, we show that the Zariski (and thus Markov) topology on Thompson's group V is irreducible, and therefore neither Hausdorff nor a group topology. As V acts highly transitively on each of its orbits, this result stands in notable opposition to a theorem by Banakh et al, which establishes that the Zariski topology on any permutation group containing all finitely supported elements is a Hausdorff group topology. Our results for the Zariski topologies on and also apply to the full homeomorphism groups , , and respectively. We conclude by providing a classification of the connected manifolds for which the homeomorphism group admits a Hausdorff Zariski topology.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.15185,
title = {The Zariski Topology on Homeomorphism groups},
author = {Luna Elliott},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.15185},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
11 pages