Distinguishing non-isomorphic groups with a group-theoretic property

First, let's start with the silly answer. Your language only has countably many different expressions, so can only divvy groups up into continuum-many classes - so there are definitely non-isomorphic groups it can't distinguish! In general this will happen as long as your language has only set-many expressions: you need a proper class sized logic like $\mathcal{L}_{\infty,\infty}$ to distinguish between all pairs of non-isomorphic structures.

That said, you're right that you're looking at something much stronger than first-order logic. Specifically, you're describing a sublogic of second-order logic, the key difference being that second-order logic lets you quantify over arbitrary subsets of the domain, and indeed functions and relations of arbitrary arity over the domain, and not just subgroups. Second-order logic doesn't have an explicit ability to refer to (say) integers built in, but it can do so via tricks of quantifying over finite configurations.

While the exact strength of the system you describe isn't clear to me, second-order logic is known to be extremely powerful. In particular, I believe there are no known natural examples of non-isomorphic second-order-elementarily-equivalent structures at all, although as per the first paragraph of this answer such structures certainly have to exist! So second-order-equivalence is a pretty strong equivalence relation, and in practice will suffice to distinguish all the groups your students run into.


Here are some simple examples where you at least need to make some decisions about what you believe about set theory to determine whether two groups are isomorphic. Assuming the axiom of choice every vector space has a basis, so $\mathbb{R}$ is isomorphic (as a group) to some direct sum of copies of $\mathbb{Q}$ (in fact necessarily to a direct sum of $|\mathbb{R}|$ copies of $\mathbb{Q}$). The existence of such a basis for $\mathbb{R}$ over $\mathbb{Q}$ allows you to construct Vitali sets, which are non-measurable, and there are models of $ZF \neg C$ in which every subset of $\mathbb{R}$ is measurable, so $\mathbb{R}$ fails to have a basis in such models.

Another example along the same lines is $\left( \prod_{\mathbb{N}} \mathbb{Q} / \bigoplus_{\mathbb{N}} \mathbb{Q} \right)^{\ast}$, taking the dual as a $\mathbb{Q}$-vector space. Assuming the axiom of choice this is a direct sum of $|\mathbb{R}|$ copies of $\mathbb{Q}$ again, but without at least enough choice to construct something like non-principal ultrafilters on $\mathbb{N}$ it's not clear how to write down a single nonzero element of this group!


Another example that's basic and probably counts as cheating: Consider $G = \mathbb{Z}^{\kappa}$ for cardinal numbers $\kappa$ starting with $\aleph_0$. I don't know enough model theory to prove it, but I can't imagine there is a group-theoretic property that distinguishes between these.