Final group topologies,Kac-Moody groups and Pontryagin duality

We study final group topologies and their relations to compactness properties. In particular, we are interested in situations where a colimit or direct limit is locally compact, a k _ω-space, or locally k _ω. As a first application, we show that unitary forms of complex Kac-Moody groups can be described as the colimit of an amalgam of subgroups (in the category of Hausdorff topological groups, and the category of k _ω-groups). Our second application concerns Pontryagin duality theory for the classes of almost metrizable topological abelian groups, resp., locally k _ω topological abelian groups, which are dual to each other. In particular, we explore the relations between countable projective limits of almost metrizable abelian groups and countable direct limits of locally k _ω abelian groups.