Ends of locally compact groups and their coset spaces

Abstract

Freudenthal [5, 7] defined a compactification of a rim-compact space, that is, a space having a base of open sets with compact boundary. The additional points are called ends and Freudenthal showed that a connected locally compact non-compact group having a countable base has one or two ends. Later, Freudenthal [8], Zippin [16], and Iwasawa [11] showed that a connected locally compact group has two ends if and only if it is the direct product of a compact group and the reals.