-independent topological groups.
A topological group
with
is called
-independent if for every subgroup
of
with
, one can find a countable dense subgroup
of
such that
. Therefore,
-independent groups are separable and have cardinality at least
.
In this talk, we will discuss some properties of
-independent topological groups. For example, we present a characterization of separable metrizable
-independent abelian groups and show that products of separable topological groups can often be
-independent, even if the factors fail to be
-independent.
Our main result is a purely algebraic characterization of
-independence in the class of compact metrizable abelian groups. We prove that a compact metrizable abelian group
with
is
-independent if and only if for every integer
, either
or
. This characterization implies that a compact metrizable abelian group is
-independent if and only if it is maximally fragmentable [Comfort and Dikranjan, Topology Proc. 44 (2014), 325–356] iff
is an
-group as defined by D. Dikranjan and D. Shakhmatov in [Advances Math. 286 (2016), 286–307].