Spherically complete field
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In mathematics, a field K with an absolute value is called spherically complete if the intersection of every decreasing sequence of balls (in the sense of the metric induced by the absolute value) is nonempty:cite-ref-1[1]
B 1 ⊇ ⊇ B 2 ⊇ ⊇ ⋯ ⋯ ⇒ ⇒ ⋂ ⋂ n ∈ ∈ N B n ≠ ≠ ∅ ∅ . {\displaystyle B_{1}\supseteq B_{2}\supseteq \cdots \Rightarrow \bigcap _{n\in {\mathbf {N} }}B_{n}\neq \emptyset .}
The definition can be adapted also to a field K with a valuation v taking values in an arbitrary ordered abelian group: (K,v) is spherically complete if every collection of balls that is totally ordered by inclusion has a nonempty intersection.
Spherically complete fields are important in nonarchimedean functional analysis, since many results analogous to theorems of classical functional analysis require the base field to be spherically complete.cite-ref-2[2]
Contents
• Examples
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Examples
• Any locally compact field is spherically complete. This includes, in particular, the fields Qp of p-adic numbers, and any of their finite extensions.
• Every spherically complete field is complete. On the other hand, Cp, the completion of the algebraic closure of Qp, is not spherically complete.cite-ref-3[3]
• Any field of Hahn series is spherically complete.
References