Totally disconnected group

In mathematics, a totally disconnected group is a topological group that is totally disconnected. Such topological groups are necessarily Hausdorff.

Interest centres on locally compact totally disconnected groups (variously referred to as groups of td-type, locally profinite groups, or t.d. groups). The compact case has been heavily studied – these are the profinite groups – but for a long time not much was known about the general case. A theorem of van Dantzig from the 1930s, stating that every such group contains a compact open subgroup, was all that was known. Then groundbreaking work by George Willis in 1994, opened up the field by showing that every locally compact totally disconnected group contains a so-called tidy subgroup and a special function on its automorphisms, the scale function, giving a quantifiable parameter for the local structure. Advances on the global structure of totally disconnected groups were obtained in 2011 by Caprace and Monod, with notably a classification of characteristically simple groups and of Noetherian groups.