Characterisation of Locally Compact Abelian Groups Having Spectral Synthesis

Abstract: In this paper we solve a long-standing problem which goes back to Laurent Schwartz's work on mean periodic functions. Namely, we completely characterise those locally compact Abelian groups having spectral synthesis. So far a characterisation theorem was available for discrete Abelian groups only. Here we use a kind of localisation concept for the ideals of the Fourier algebra of the underlying group. We show that localisability of ideals is equivalent to synthesizability. Based on this equivalence we show that if spectral synthesis 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.