The Absolute of finitely generated groups: I. Commutative groups

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We give a complete description of the absolute of commutative finitely generated groups and semigroups. The absolute (previously called the exit boundary) is a further elaboration of the notion of the boundary of a random walk on a group (the Poisson--Furstenberg boundary); namely, the absolute of a (semi)group is the set of ergodic central measures on the compactum of all infinite trajectories of a simple random walk on the group. Related notions have been discussed in the probability literature: Martin boundary, entrance and exit boundaries (Dynkin), central measures on path spaces of graphs (Vershik--Kerov). A central measure (with respect to a finite system of generators of a group or semigroup) is a Markov measure on the space of trajectories whose cotransition distribution at every point is the uniform distribution on the generators (i.e., a measure of maximal entropy). For a more general notion of measures with a given cocycle. For the group Z, the problem of describing the absolute is solved exactly by the classical de Finetti's theorem. The main result of this paper, which is a far-reaching generalization of de Finetti's theorem, is as follows: the absolute of a commutative semigroup coincides with the set of central measures corresponding to (nonstationary) Markov chains with independent identically distributed increments. Topologically, the absolute is (in the main case) a closed disk of finite dimension.