Gleason’s lemma

This is another installment of my my series of posts on Hilbert’s fifth problem. One formulation of this problem is answered by the following theorem of Gleason and Montgomery-Zippin:

Theorem 1 (Hilbert’s fifth problem) Let be a topological group which is locally Euclidean. Then is isomorphic to a Lie group.

Theorem 1 is deep and difficult result, but the discussion in the previous posts has reduced the proof of this Theorem to that of establishing two simpler results, involving the concepts of a no small subgroups (NSS) subgroup, and that of a Gleason metric. We briefly recall the relevant definitions:

Definition 2 (NSS) A topological group is said to have no small subgroups, or is NSS for short, if there is an open neighbourhood of the identity in that contains no subgroups of other than the trivial subgroup .

Definition 3 (Gleason metric) Let be a topological group. A Gleason metric on is a left-invariant metric which generates the topology on and obeys the following properties for some constant , writing for :

• (Escape property) If and is such that , then

  

• (Commutator estimate) If are such that , then

  

  where is the commutator of and .

The remaining steps in the resolution of Hilbert’s fifth problem are then as follows:

Theorem 4 (Reduction to the NSS case) Let be a locally compact group, and let be an open neighbourhood of the identity in . Then there exists an open subgroup of , and a compact subgroup of contained in , such that is NSS and locally compact.

Theorem 5 (Gleason’s lemma) Let be a locally compact NSS group. Then has a Gleason metric.

The purpose of this post is to establish these two results, using arguments that are originally due to Gleason. We will split this task into several subtasks, each of which improves the structure on the group by some amount:

Proposition 6 (From locally compact to metrisable) Let be a locally compact group, and let be an open neighbourhood of the identity in . Then there exists an open subgroup of , and a compact subgroup of contained in , such that is locally compact and metrisable.

For any open neighbourhood of the identity in , let be the union of all the subgroups of that are contained in . (Thus, for instance, is NSS if and only if is trivial for all sufficiently small .)

Proposition 7 (From metrisable to subgroup trapping) Let be a locally compact metrisable group. Then has the subgroup trapping property: for every open neighbourhood of the identity, there exists another open neighbourhood of the identity such that generates a subgroup contained in .

Proposition 8 (From subgroup trapping to NSS) Let be a locally compact group with the subgroup trapping property, and let be an open neighbourhood of the identity in . Then there exists an open subgroup of , and a compact subgroup of contained in , such that is locally compact and NSS.

Proposition 9 (From NSS to the escape property) Let be a locally compact NSS group. Then there exists a left-invariant metric on generating the topology on which obeys the escape property (1) for some constant .

Proposition 10 (From escape to the commutator estimate) Let be a locally compact group with a left-invariant metric that obeys the escape property (1). Then also obeys the commutator property (2).

It is clear that Propositions 6, 7, and 8 combine to give Theorem 4, and Propositions 9, 10 combine to give Theorem 5.

Propositions 6-10 are all proven separately, but their proofs share some common strategies and ideas. The first main idea is to construct metrics on a locally compact group by starting with a suitable “bump function” (i.e. a continuous, compactly supported function from to ) and pulling back the metric structure on by using the translation action , thus creating a (semi-)metric

One easily verifies that this is indeed a (semi-)metric (in that it is non-negative, symmetric, and obeys the triangle inequality); it is also left-invariant, and so we have , where

where is the difference operator ,

This construction was already seen in the proof of the Birkhoff-Kakutani theorem, which is the main tool used to establish Proposition 6. For the other propositions, the idea is to choose a bump function that is “smooth” enough that it creates a metric with good properties such as the commutator estimate (2). Roughly speaking, to get a bound of the form (2), one needs to have “ regularity” with respect to the “right” smooth structure on By regularity, we mean here something like a bound of the form

for all . Here we use the usual asymptotic notation, writing or if for some constant (which can vary from line to line).

The following lemma illustrates how regularity can be used to build Gleason metrics.

Lemma 11 Suppose that obeys (4). Then the (semi-)metric (and associated (semi-)norm ) obey the escape property (1) and the commutator property (2).

Proof: We begin with the commutator property (2). Observe the identity

whence

From the triangle inequality (and translation-invariance of the norm) we thus see that (2) follows from (4). Similarly, to obtain the escape property (1), observe the telescoping identity

for any and natural number , and thus by the triangle inequality

But from (4) (and the triangle inequality) we have

and thus we have the “Taylor expansion”

which gives (1).

It remains to obtain that have the desired regularity property. In order to get such regular bump functions, we will use the trick of convolving together two lower regularity bump functions (such as two functions with “ regularity” in some sense to be determined later). In order to perform this convolution, we will use the fundamental tool of (left-invariant) Haar measure on the locally compact group . Here we exploit the basic fact that the convolution

of two functions tends to be smoother than either of the two factors . This is easiest to see in the abelian case, since in this case we can distribute derivatives according to the law

which suggests that the order of “differentiability” of should be the sum of the orders of and separately.

These ideas are already sufficient to establish Proposition 10 directly, and also Proposition 9 when comined with an additional bootstrap argument. The proofs of Proposition 7 and Proposition 8 use similar techniques, but is more difficult due to the potential presence of small subgroups, which require an application of the Peter-Weyl theorem to properly control. Both of these theorems will be proven below the fold, thus (when combined with the preceding posts) completing the proof of Theorem 1.

The presentation here is based on some unpublished notes of van den Dries and Goldbring on Hilbert’s fifth problem. I am indebted to Emmanuel Breuillard, Ben Green, and Tom Sanders for many discussions related to these arguments.