Compactifications of pseudofinite and pseudoamenable groups

Abstract

We first give simplified and corrected accounts of some results in work by Pillay (2017) on compactifications of pseudofinite groups. For instance, we use a classical theorem of Turing (1938) to give a simplified proof that any definable compactification of a pseudofinite group has an abelian connected component. We then discuss the relationship between Turing’s work, the Jordan–Schur theorem, and a (relatively) more recent result of Kazhdan (1982) on approximate homomorphisms, and we use this to widen our scope from finite groups to amenable groups. In particular, we develop a suitable continuous logic framework for dealing with definable homomorphisms from pseudoamenable groups to compact Lie groups. Together with the stabilizer theorems of Hrushovski (2012) and Montenegro et al. (2020), we obtain a uniform (but non-quantitative) analogue of Bogolyubov’s lemma for sets of positive measure in discrete amenable groups. We conclude with brief remarks on the case of amenable topological groups.