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Approximating simple locally compact groups by their dense locally compact subgroups

The class, denoted by $\mathscr{S}$, of totally disconnected locally compact groups which are non-discrete, compactly generated, and topologically simple contains many compelling examples. In recent years, a general theory for these groups, which studies the interaction between the compact open subgroups and the global structure, has emerged. In this article, we study the non-discrete totally disconnected locally compact groups $H$ that admit a continuous embedding with dense image into some $G\in \mathscr{S}$; that is, we consider the dense locally compact subgroups of groups $G\in \mathscr{S}$. We identify a class $\mathscr{R}$ of almost simple groups which properly contains $\mathscr{S}$ and is moreover stable under passing to a non-discrete dense locally compact subgroup. We show that $\mathscr{R}$ enjoys many of the same properties previously obtained for $\mathscr{S}$ and establish various original results for $\mathscr{R}$ that are also new for the subclass $\mathscr{S}$, notably concerning the structure of the local Sylow subgroups and the full automorphism group.