Torsion theories and Galois coverings of topological groups

For any torsion theory in a homological category, one can define a categorical Galois structure and try to describe the corresponding Galois coverings. In this article we provide several characterizations of these coverings for a special class of torsion theories, which we call quasi-hereditary. We describe a new reflective factorization system that is induced by any quasi-hereditary torsion theory. These results are then applied to study various examples of torsion theories in the category of topological groups. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.