English

Willis Theory via Graphs

Group Theory 2018-10-11 v2

Abstract

We study the scale and tidy subgroups of an endomorphism of a totally disconnected locally compact group using a geometric framework. This leads to new interpretations of tidy subgroups and the scale function. Foremost, we obtain a geometric tidying procedure which applies to endomorphisms as well as a geometric proof of the fact that tidiness is equivalent to being minimizing for a given endomorphism. Our framework also yields an endomorphism version of the Baumgartner-Willis tree representation theorem. We conclude with a construction of new endomorphisms of totally disconnected locally compact groups from old via HNN-extensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.09610,
  title  = {Willis Theory via Graphs},
  author = {Timothy P. Bywaters and Stephan Tornier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09610},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Revised statement and proof of Lemma 5.2. Amended incomplete arguments in the proofs of Lemma 5.4, Proposition 6.3, Lemma 6.4 and Theorem 6.6. General editing and fixing typos

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:57:41.378Z