On Schwartz groups

We introduce a notion of a Schwartz group, which turns out to be coherent with the well known concept of a Schwartz topological vector space. We establish several basic properties of Schwartz groups and show that free topological Abelian groups, as well as free locally convex spaces, over hemicompact k-spaces are Schwartz groups. We also prove that every hemicompact k-space topological group, in particular the Pontryagin dual of a metrizable topological group, is a Schwartz group.