Invertibles in topological rings: a new approach

Every element in the boundary of the group of invertibles of a Banach algebra is a topological zero divisor. We extend this result to the scope of topological rings. In particular, we define a new class of semi-normed rings, called almost absolutely semi-normed rings, which strictly includes the class of absolutely semi-valued rings, and prove that every element in the boundary of the group of invertibles of a complete almost absolutely semi-normed ring is a topological zero divisor. To achieve all these, we have to previously entail an exhaustive study of topological divisors of zero in topological rings. In addition, it is also well known that the group of invertibles is open and the inversion map is continuous and $$\mathbb {C}$$ -differentiable in a Banach algebra. We also extend these results to the setting of complete normed rings. Finally, this study allows us to generalize the point, continuous and residual spectra to the scope of Banach algebras.