Totally distributive toposes (Q1936112)

There are several conditions on partially ordered sets that can be expressed in categorical terms by requiring the existence of a string of adjunctions between the poset and some related poset, say of ideals or similar. This is the case, for instance, for continuous dcpos. These conditions extend in useful ways to small categories, relating to strings of adjunctions typically involving the Yoneda embedding. These results are recalled in the first section of this paper, and then are applied and extended to the study of totally distributive categories. A category, \(\mathcal{E}\), is \textit{totally distributive} if there is a string of adjunctions \(t\dashv c\dashv y\), where \(y\) is the Yoneda embedding. The category, \(\mathcal{E}\), is \textit{lex totally distributive} if in addition \(t\) preserves finite limits. In this paper, the author shows that lex totally distributive categories with a small set of generators correspond exactly to injective Grothendieck toposes, whilst removing the `lex' condition gives the essential subtoposes of presheaf toposes.