Spectral synthesis on locally compact Abelian groups

Abstract: In this talk we present a solution to a long-standing problem which goes back to Laurent Schwartz’s work on mean periodic functions. Namely, we completely characterize those locally compact Abelian groups having spectral synthesis. So far a characterization theorem was available for discrete Abelian groups only. Here we use a kind of localization concept for the ideals of the Fourier algebra of the underlying group. We show that localizability of ideals is equivalent to synthesizability. Based on this equivalence we show that if spectral synthesis holds on a locally compact Abelian group, then it holds on each extension of it by a locally compact Abelian group consisting of compact elements, and also on any extension to a direct sum with a copy of the integers. Then, using Schwartz's result and Gurevich's counterexamples we apply the structure theory of locally compact Abelian groups to obtain our characterization theorem.