The universal valued Abelian groups of Niemiec are Lévy, strongly exotic, extremely amenable, and $\mathbb{G}_r(0)$ is generically monothetic

Abstract

We prove various properties of the universal valued Abelian groups $\mathbb{G}_r(N)$ constructed by Niemiec, for $r\in\{1,\infty\}$ and $N\in\{0,2,3,\ldots\}$. First we show that the completion of $Γ_0=\bigoplus_{n\in\mathbb{N}}\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z}$ (for $N=0$) or $Γ_N=\bigoplus_{n\in\mathbb{N}}\mathbb{Z}/N\mathbb{Z}$ (for $N\geq 2$) with respect to a generic invariant metric, bounded by $1$ when $r=1$, is isometrically group-isomorphic to $\mathbb{G}_r(N)$, recovering a result of Doucha in the case when $r=\infty $ and $N=0$. This confirms an expectation of Doucha for the group $Γ_N$. We combine this genericity result with a criterion of Melleray and Tsankov concerning the extreme amenability of the generic completion of a countable group to obtain the extreme amenability of $\mathbb{G}_r(N)$. We then establish the strictly stronger properties that these groups are Lévy and strongly exotic. We conclude by showing that $\mathbb{G}_r(0)$ is also monothetic, from which we obtain the existence of a monothetic group structure on the Urysohn sphere, giving a bounded version of a result by Cameron and Vershik and answering a question of Niemiec.