Expressive Power of Infinitary Logic and Absolute co-Hopfianity

Abstract

Recently, Paolini and Shelah have constructed absolutely Hopfian torsion-free abelian groups of any given size. In contrast, we show that this is not necessarily the case for absolutely co-Hopfian groups. We use the infinitary logic to show that there are no absolute co-Hopfian abelian groups above the first beautiful cardinal. An extension of this result to the category of modules over a commutative ring is given.