Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2014
Which groups are isomorphic to automorphism groups of models of Peano Arithmetic? It will be shown here that any group that has half a chance of being isomorphic to the automorphism group of some model of Peano Arithmetic actually is.
For any structure , let Aut(
) be its automorphism group. There are groups which are not isomorphic to any model
= (N, +, ·, 0, 1, ≤) of PA. For example, it is clear that Aut(N), being a subgroup of Aut((
, <)), must be torsion-free. However, as will be proved in this paper, if (A, <) is a linearly ordered set and G is a subgroup of Aut((A, <)), then there are models
of PA such that Aut(
) ≅ G.
If is a structure, then its automorphism group can be considered as a topological group by letting the stabilizers of finite subsets of A be the basic open subgroups. If
′ is an expansion of
, then Aut(
′) is a closed subgroup of Aut(
). Conversely, for any closed subgroup G ≤ Aut(
) there is an expansion
′ of
such that Aut(
′) = G. Thus, if
is a model of PA, then Aut(
) is not only a subgroup of Aut((N, <)), but it is even a closed subgroup of Aut((N, ′)).
There is a characterization, due to Cohn [2] and to Conrad [3], of those groups G which are isomorphic to closed subgroups of automorphism groups of linearly ordered sets.