Saturday, 28 July 2007

mg.metric geometry - Can the algebraic closure of a complete field be complete and of infinite degree?

Yes, this is yet another "foundational" question in valuation theory.



Here's the background: it is a well known classical fact that the dimension (in the purely algebraic sense) of a real Banach space cannot be countably infinite. The proof is a simple application of the Baire Category Theorem: see e.g.



http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/ABanachSpaceOfInfiniteDimensionDoesntHaveACountableAlgebraicBasis.html



Suppose now that (K,||) is a complete non-Archimedean (edit: nontrivial) normed field. One has the notion of a K-Banach space, and the Baire Category Theorem argument works verbatim to show that such a thing cannot have countably infinite K-dimension.



Now let overlineK be an algebraic closure of K. Then overlineK, by virtue of being a direct limit of finite-dimensional normed spaces over the complete field K, has a canonical topology, and indeed a unique multiplicative norm which extends || on K.



My question is: does there exist a complete normed field (K,||) such that:
(i) [overlineK:K]=infty and
(ii) overlineK is complete with respect to its norm?



As with a previous question, it is not too hard to see that this does not happen in the most familiar cases. Indeed, by the above considerations this can only happen if [overlineK:K] is uncountable. But [overlineK:K] will be countable if K has a countable dense subfield F [to be absolutely safe, let me also require that F is perfect]. Indeed, the algebraic closure of any infinite field has the same cardinality of the field, so overlineF can be obtained by adjoining roots of a countable collection of separable polynomials Pi(t)inF[t]. It follows from Krasner's Lemma that by adjoining to K the roots of these polynomials one gets overlineK.



What about the general case?

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