A Conjecture on the Hall Topology for the Free Group

The Hall topology for the free group is the coarsest topologysuch that every group morphism from the free group onto a finitediscrete group is continuous. It was shoen by M.Hall Jr thatevery finitely generated subgroup of the free group is closedfor this topology. We conjecture that if H₁, H₂,...,H_n are finitelygenerated subgroups of the free group, then the product H₁ H₂...H_n is closed. We discuss some consequences of this conjecture.First, it would give a nice and simple algorithm to computethe closure of a given rational subset of the free group. Next,it implies a similar conjecture for the free monoid, which inturn is equivalent to a deep conjecture on finite semigroupsfor the solution of which J. Rhodes has offered $100. We hopethat our new conjecture will shed some light on Rhodes' conjecture.