A note concerning a tidying procedure and contraction groups in non-metrizable, totally disconnected groups

Abstract

In a 2004 article, Udo Baumgartner and George Willis used ideas from the structure theory of totally disconnected, locally compact groups to achieve a better understanding of the contraction group U_f associated with an automorphism f of such a group G, assuming that G is metrizable. (Recall that U_f consists of all group elements x such that f^n(x) tends to the identity element as n tends to infinity). Recently, Wojciech Jaworski showed that the main technical tool of the latter article remains valid in the non-metrizable case. He asserted without proof that, therefore, all results from that article remain valid. However, metrizability enters the arguments at a second point. In this note, we resolve this difficulty, by providing an affirmative answer to a question posed by Willis in 2004.

A superior, direct discussion of the "second point" mentioned in the abstract has been communicated by W. Jaworski to the author, which makes the reduction step to metrizable groups unnecessary. Therefore the note has been withdrawn