Hereditarily minimal topological groups

Abstract: We study locally compact groups having all subgroups minimal. We call such groups hereditarily minimal. In 1972 Prodanov proved that the infinite hereditarily minimal compact abelian groups are precisely the groups $\mathbb Z_p$ of $p$-adic integers. We extend Prodanov's theorem to the non-abelian case at several levels. For infinite hypercentral (in particular, nilpotent) locally compact groups we show that the hereditarily minimal ones remain the same as in the abelian case. On the other hand, we classify completely the locally compact solvable hereditarily minimal groups, showing that in particular they are always compact and metabelian. The proofs involve the (hereditarily) locally minimal groups, introduced similarly. In particular, we prove a conjecture by He, Xiao and the first two authors, showing that the group $\mathbb Q_p\rtimes \mathbb Q_p^*$ is hereditarily locally minimal, where $\mathbb Q_p^*$ is the multiplicative group of non-zero $p$-adic numbers acting on the first component by multiplication. Furthermore, it turns out that the locally compact solvable hereditarily minimal groups are closely related to this group.