This book provides an introduction to topological groups and the structure theory of locally compact abelian groups, with a special emphasis on Pontryagin-van Kampen duality, including a completely self-contained elementary proof of the duality theorem. Further related topics and applications are treated in separate chapters and in the appendix.

Lydia Außenhofer, University of Passau, Germany; Dikran Dikranjan andAnna Giordano Bruno, University of Udine, Italy.