Growing trees from compact subgroups

Abstract

We establish a new connection between local and large-scale structure in compactly generated totally disconnected locally compact (t.d.l.c.) groups $G$, finding a sufficient condition for $G$ to have more than one end in terms of its compact subgroups. The condition actually results in an action of a quotient group $G/N$ on a tree with faithful micro-supported action on the boundary, where $N$ is compact, and is closely related to the Boolean algebra formed by the centralisers of the subgroups of $G/N$ with open normaliser. As an application, we find a sufficient condition, given a one-ended t.d.l.c. group $G$, for all direct factors of open subgroups of $G$ to be trivial or open.