General non-commutative locally compact locally Hausdorff Stone duality (Q1628419)

Classical Stone duality constructs a contravariant equivalence between the categories of \(0\)-dimensional compact Hausdorff spaces (plus continuous maps) and Boolean algebras (plus homomorphisms). On the one side there is a category of topological structures and continuous homomorphisms; on the other there is a category whose objects constitute an elementary productive class -- in the model-theoretic sense -- of finitary relational structures. (Another famous example of this phenomenon is Pontryagin duality between the compact Hausdorff and the discrete abelian groups.) In the early 1980s, this reviewer asked whether Stone duality could be properly extended to a full subcategory of the compact Hausdorff spaces -- in such a way that the dual category is still an elementary productive class -- and \textit{B. Banaschewski} [Can. J. Math. 36, 1113--1118 (1984; Zbl 0561.18004)] gave an elegant proof that it could not. In the present paper, the authors take a different approach to the problem of going beyond \(0\)-dimensionality and set about showing that ``certain bases of general locally compact locally Hausdorff étale groupoids are dual to a natural first order finitely axiomatizable class of inverse semigroups.'' The details are quite involved, and the interested reader is invited to consult the paper.