Realcompactness and the cozero part of a frame (Q5947276)

The `natural' definition of realcompact locales, as those locales embeddable as closed sublocales of powers of the locale of reals, has been studied by several authors. However, because locale products do not in general coincide with space products, this notion is not a `conservative extension' of realcompactness for spaces -- i.e., there are realcompact spaces whose open-set lattices are not realcompact as locales. Indeed, J. Madden and J. Vermeer showed that the realcompact locales (in this sense) are exactly the regular locales which satisfy the Lindelöf covering property. If one views this result as a shortcoming of the category of locales (rather than, as the reviewer would prefer, viewing its failure for topological spaces as a shortcoming of the latter), then it is natural to seek alternative definitions of realcompactness for locales. One such definition was proposed by G. Schlitt; the present paper proposes two alternatives, one in terms of properties of the \(\sigma\)-frame of cozero elements of a given frame, and the other in terms of uniformities, both of which are shown to be equivalent to Schlitt's condition in the presence of the axiom of countable choice. They show that the realcompactification (in their sense) of a completely regular locale is the `relatively spatial part', in the sense of the first author and S. S. Hong, of its realcompactification in the original sense. In an appendix, they also consider the zero-dimensional analogue (`\(N\)-compactness') of their definition.