Quotients of complete ordered sets (Q793061)

When does a complete lattice K have a noncomplete homomorphic image? The authors show that K must contain a subset isomorphic to \(2^ N\), where N denotes the natural numbers. If K is distributive, the condition is shown to be both necessary and sufficient. It is of some interest to note that as a consequence of the above result, if K is countable, or has finite dimension, or has no infinite antichain, then every homomorphic image of K must be complete. It is also shown that every homomorphic image of a complete lattice with finite dimension is in fact a retract. An ordered set P is called locally chain-complete if each maximal chain connecting a pair of elements x,y \((x<y)\) is complete. The final main result of the paper is that if Q is a quotient of an ordered set P with no infinite antichain, then P locally chain-complete implies that Q also has this property. Note here that to say that Q is a quotient of P is to say that there is an isotone mapping f of P onto Q such that for \(u<v\) in P there is a finite sequence \(x_ 1,x_ 2,...,x_ n\) of elements of P such that \(f(x_ 1)=u,\quad x_ 1\leq x_ 2,\quad f(x_ 2)=f(x_ 3),...,x_{n-1}\leq x_ n,\) and \(f(x_ n)=v.\) The paper closes by posing a number of interesting open questions.