Recovering ordered structures from quotients of their automorphism groups

Abstract

We show that the ‘tail’ of a doubly homogeneous chain of countable cofinality can be recognized in the quotient of its automorphism group by the subgroup consisting of those elements whose support is bounded above. This extends the authors’ earlier result establishing this for the rationals and reals. We deduce that any group is isomorphic to the outer automorphism group of some simple lattice-ordered group.