Locally profinite group


In mathematics, a locally profinite group is a Hausdorff topological group in which every neighborhood of the identity element contains a compact open subgroup. Equivalently, a locally profinite group is a topological group that is Hausdorff, locally compact, and totally disconnected. Moreover, a locally profinite group is compact if and only if it is profinite; this explains the terminology. Basic examples of locally profinite groups are discrete groups and p-adic Lie group. Non-examples are real Lie groups which have no small subgroup property.
In a locally profinite group, a closed subgroup is locally profinite, and every compact subgroup is contained in an open compact subgroup.

Examples

Important examples of locally profinite groups come from algebraic number theory. Let F be a non-archimedean local field. Then both F and are locally profinite. More generally, the matrix ring and the general linear group are locally profinite. Another example of a locally profinite group is the absolute Weil group of a non-archimedean local field: this is in contrast to the fact that the absolute Galois group of such is profinite.

Representations of a locally profinite group

Let G be a locally profinite group. Then a group homomorphism is continuous if and only if it has open kernel.
Let be a complex representation of G. is said to be smooth if V is a union of where K runs over all open compact subgroups K. is said to be admissible if it is smooth and is finite-dimensional for any open compact subgroup K.
We now make a blanket assumption that is at most countable for all open compact subgroups K.
The dual space carries the action of G given by. In general, is not smooth. Thus, we set where is acting through and set. The smooth representation is then called the contragredient or smooth dual of.
The contravariant functor
from the category of smooth representations of G to itself is exact. Moreover, the following are equivalent.
When is admissible, is irreducible if and only if is irreducible.
The countability assumption at the beginning is really necessary, for there exists a locally profinite group that admits an irreducible smooth representation such that is not irreducible.

Hecke algebra of a locally profinite group

Let be a unimodular locally profinite group such that is at most countable for all open compact subgroups K, and a left Haar measure on. Let denote the space of locally constant functions on with compact support. With the multiplicative structure given by
becomes not necessarily unital associative -algebra. It is called the Hecke algebra of G and is denoted by. The algebra plays an important role in the study of smooth representations of locally profinite groups. Indeed, one has the following: given a smooth representation of G, we define a new action on V:
Thus, we have the functor from the category of smooth representations of to the category of non-degenerate -modules. Here, "non-degenerate" means. Then the fact is that the functor is an equivalence.