Positive answers to Koch’s problem in special cases

Abstract A topological semigroup is monothetic provided it contains a dense cyclic subsemigroup. The Koch problem asks whether every locally compact monothetic monoid is compact. This problem was opened for more than sixty years, till in 2018 Zelenyuk obtained a negative answer. In this paper we obtain a positive answer for Koch’s problem for some special classes of topological monoids. Namely, we show that a locally compact monothetic topological monoid S is a compact topological group if and only if S is a submonoid of a quasitopological group if and only if S has open shifts if and only if S is non-viscous in the sense of Averbukh. The last condition means that any neighborhood U of the identity 1 of S and for any element a ∈ S there exists a neighborhood V of a such that any element x ∈ S with (xV ∪ Vx) ∩ V ≠ ∅ belongs to the neighborhood U of 1.