On feebly compact paratopological groups

Abstract

We obtain many results and solve some problems about feebly compact paratopological groups. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for such a group to be topological. One of them is the quasiregularity. We prove that each $2$-pseudocompact paratopological group is feebly compact and that each Hausdorff $\sigma$-compact feebly compact paratopological group is a compact topological group. Our particular attention concerns periodic and topologically periodic groups. We construct examples of various compact-like paratopological groups which are not topological groups, among them a $T_0$ sequentially compact group, a $T_1$ $2$-pseudocompact group, a functionally Hausdorff countably compact group (under the axiomatic assumption that there is an infinite torsion-free abelian countably compact topological group without non-trivial convergent sequences), and a functionally Hausdorff second countable group sequentially pracompact group. We investigate cone topologies of paratopological groups which provide a general tool to construct pathological examples, especially examples of compact-like paratopological groups with discontinuous inversion. We find a simple interplay between the algebraic properties of a basic cone subsemigroup $S$ of a group $G$ and compact-like properties of two basic semigroup topologies generated by $S$ on the group $G$. We prove that the product of a family of feebly compact paratopological groups is feebly compact, and that a paratopological group $G$ is feebly compact provided it has a feebly compact normal subgroup $H$ such that a quotient group $G/H$ is feebly compact.