In finite group theory, chief factors play an important and well-understood role in the structure theory. We here develop a theory of chief factors for Polish groups. In the development of this theory, we prove a version of the Schreier refinement theorem. We also prove a trichotomy for the structure of topologically characteristically simple Polish groups.

The development of the theory of chief factors requires two independently interesting lines of study. First we consider injective, continuous homomorphisms with dense normal image. We show such maps admit a canonical factorisation via a semidirect product, and as a consequence, these maps preserve topological simplicity up to abelian error. We then define two generalisations of direct products and use these to isolate a notion of semisimplicity for Polish groups.

We present infinite analogues of our splinter lemma for constructing nested sets of separations. From these we derive several tree-of-tangles-type theorems for infinite graphs and infinite abstract separation systems.

The following question is proposed by Martino, Tointon, Valiunas and Ventura in [4, question 1·20]:

Let G be a compact group, and suppose that

\[\mathcal{N}_k(G) = \{(x_1,\dots,x_{k+1}) \in G^{k+1} \;|\; [x_1,\dots, x_{k+1}] = 1\}\]

$G^{k+1}$

We give a positive answer for $k = 2$ .

For any fixed nonzero integer h, we show that a positive proportion of integral binary quartic forms F do locally everywhere represent h, but do not globally represent h. We order classes of integral binary quartic forms by the two generators of their ring of ${\rm GL}_{2}({\mathbb Z})$ -invariants, classically denoted by I and J.

Let Y be a smooth complete intersection of three quadrics, and assume the dimension of Y is even. We show that Y has a multiplicative Chow–Künneth decomposition, in the sense of Shen–Vial. As a consequence, the Chow ring of (powers of) Y displays K3-like behaviour. As a by-product of the argument, we also establish a multiplicative Chow–Künneth decomposition for double planes.

Given an infinite subset $\mathcal{A} \subseteq\mathbb{N}$ , let A denote its smallest N elements. There is a rich and growing literature on the question of whether for typical $\alpha\in[0,1]$ , the pair correlations of the set $\alpha A (\textrm{mod}\ 1)\subset [0,1]$ are asymptotically Poissonian as N increases. We define an inhomogeneous generalisation of the concept of pair correlation, and we consider the corresponding doubly metric question. Many of the results from the usual setting carry over to this new setting. Moreover, the double metricity allows us to establish some new results whose singly metric analogues are missing from the literature.

It was observed recently in work of Bez, Buschenhenke, Cowling, Flock and the first author, that the euclidean Brascamp–Lieb inequality satisfies a natural and useful Fourier duality property. The purpose of this paper is to establish an appropriate discrete analogue of this. Our main result identifies the Brascamp–Lieb constants on (finitely-generated) discrete abelian groups with Brascamp–Lieb constants on their (Pontryagin) duals. As will become apparent, the natural setting for this duality principle is that of locally compact abelian groups, and this raises basic questions about Brascamp–Lieb constants formulated in this generality.

We improve the best known sum-product estimates over the reals. We prove that

\[\max(|A+A|,|A+A|)\geq |A|^{\frac{4}{3} + \frac{2}{1167} - o(1)}\,,\]

$A\subset \mathbb {R}$

Furthermore,

\[|AA+AA|\geq |A|^{\frac{127}{80} - o(1)}\,.\]

\[|A+A|\geq |A|^{\frac{30}{19}-o(1)}\,.\]

Let A be an abelian variety defined over a number field k, let p be an odd prime number and let $F/k$ be a cyclic extension of p-power degree. Under not-too-stringent hypotheses we give an interpretation of the p-component of the relevant case of the equivariant Tamagawa number conjecture in terms of integral congruence relations involving the evaluation on appropriate points of A of the ${\rm Gal}(F/k)$ -valued height pairing of Mazur and Tate. We then discuss the numerical computation of this pairing, and in particular obtain the first numerical verifications of this conjecture in situations in which the p-completion of the Mordell–Weil group of A over F is not a projective Galois module.

For a locally compact metrisable group G, we study the action of ${\rm Aut}(G)$ on ${\rm Sub}_G$ , the set of closed subgroups of G endowed with the Chabauty topology. Given an automorphism T of G, we relate the distality of the T-action on ${\rm Sub}_G$ with that of the T-action on G under a certain condition. If G is a connected Lie group, we characterise the distality of the T-action on ${\rm Sub}_G$ in terms of compactness of the closed subgroup generated by T in ${\rm Aut}(G)$ under certain conditions on the center of G or on T as follows: G has no compact central subgroup of positive dimension or T is unipotent or T is contained in the connected component of the identity in ${\rm Aut}(G)$ . Moreover, we also show that a connected Lie group G acts distally on ${\rm Sub}_G$ if and only if G is either compact or it is isomorphic to a direct product of a compact group and a vector group. All the results on the Lie groups mentioned above hold for the action on ${\rm Sub}^a_G$ , a subset of ${\rm Sub}_G$ consisting of closed abelian subgroups of G.