Long colimits of topological groups II: Free groups and vector spaces

Abstract

Topological properties of the free topological group and the free abelian topological group on a space have been thoroughly studied since the 1940s. In this paper, we study the free topological $\mathbb{R}$-vector space $V(X)$ on $X$. We show that $V(X)$ is a quotient of the free abelian topological group on $[-1,1]\times X$, and use this to prove topological vector space analogues of existing results for free topological groups on pseudocompact spaces. As an application, we show that certain families of subspaces of $V(X)$ satisfy the so-called $\textit{algebraic colimit property}$ defined in the authors' previous work.