Profinite groups associated to sofic shifts are free

Profinite Groups Associated to Sofic Shifts Are Free

We show that the maximal subgroup of the free profinite semigroup associated by Almeida to an irreducible sofic shift is a free profinite group, generalizing an earlier result of the second author for the case of the full shift (whose corresponding maximal subgroup is the maximal subgroup of the minimal ideal). A corresponding result is proved for certain relatively free profinite semigroups. W...

Sofic groups and profinite topology on free groups

We give a definition of weakly sofic groups (w-sofic groups). Our definition is rather natural extension of the definition of sofic groups where instead of Hamming metric on symmetric groups we use general bi-invariant metrics on finite groups. The existence of non w-sofic groups is equivalent to some conjecture about profinite topology on free groups.

S ep 2 00 8 Sofic groups and profinite topology on free groups ⋆

We give a definition of weakly sofic groups (w-sofic groups). Our definition is a rather natural extension of the definition of sofic groups where instead of the Hamming metric on symmetric groups we use general bi-invariant metrics on finite groups. The existence of non w-sofic groups is equivalent to a profinite topology property of products of conjugacy classes in free groups.

Random Normal Subgroups of Free Profinite Groups

Profinite Topologies in Free Products of Groups

Let H be an abstract group and let C be a variety of finite groups (i.e., a class of finite groups closed under taking subgroups, quotients and finite direct products); for example the variety of all finite p-groups, for a fixed prime p. Consider the smallest topology on H such that all the homomorphism H −→ C from H to any group C ∈ C (endowed with the discrete topology) is continuous. We refe...