Abstract simplicity of locally compact Kac-Moody groups

In this paper, we establish that complete Kac-Moody groups over finite fields are abstractly simple. The proof makes an essential use of Mathieu-Rousseau’s construction of complete Kac-Moody groups over fields. This construction has the advantage that both real and imaginary root spaces of the Lie algebra lift to root subgroups over arbitrary fields. A key point in our proof is the fact, of independent interest, that both real and imaginary root subgroups are contracted by conjugation of positive powers of suitable Weyl group elements.