General facts on the Scott adjunction (Q2139725)

The Scott adjunction relates directed-complete partially ordered sets (dcpo's) and topological spaces, or if one prefers, locales. One associates with a dcpo the locale given by the open sets for the Scott topology on it and, in the opposite direction, associates with a locale the dcpo of its points. In this article the author studies the extension of it at level of categories involving, respectively, the 2-categories of accessible categories with directed colimits and toposes, obtaining thus a biadjunction. The former adjunction becomes then a restriction of the latter, as the category of dcpo's embeds into that of accessible categories with directed colimits and the category of locales into that of toposes via the topos of sheaves. In this categorified version one associates with a topos its category of points, which is known to be accessible and have directed colimits, while with an accessible category with directed colimits the category of functors from it to the category of sets which preserve directed colimits. This turns out to be a topos (the Scott topos of the accessble category), as can be shown by verifying the Giraud axioms for a Grothendieck topos. This result, along with the verification of the adjointness equivalence, was obtained jointly by the author and S. Henry and is presented in somewhat more detail also in [\textit{S.~Henry}, J. Symb. Log. 84, No. 3, 1240--1251 (2019; Zbl 1429.18004)]. The author proceeds to show that the 2-category \(Acc_{\omega}\) of accessible categories with directed colimits and directed-colimit-preserving functors has an internal hom-object. For objects \(\mathcal{A},\) \(\mathcal{B} \in Acc_{\omega}\) it is given by the category of directed-colimit-preserving functors between them, which again turns out to be sketchable, thus accessible. (The paper [\textit{P.~Ageron}, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 79, No. 1, 15-34 (1992; Zbl 0763.18001)] could possibly be added in this connection to the extensive list of references provided.) Furthermore, a technically more involved description of a tensor product in \(Acc_{\omega}\) is possible, rendering it a monoidal biclosed bicategory (Theorem 3.6), the category of Grothendieck toposes and geometric morphisms is enriched over it (Theorem 3.14) and has tensors over it (Proposition 3.19). In a final section properties of the two functors participating in the adjunction are studied, along with questions about the faithfulness (and iso-fullness) of the unit of the adjunction. The latter is equivalent to the accessible category admitting a faithful (and iso-full) functor, preserving directed colimits, to a finitely accessible category (Proposition 4.13). He also introduces the notion of topological embedding between objects of \(Acc_{\omega}\) (a functor mapped by the Scott topos construction to a geometric inclusion). These include the reflective embeddings (Theorem 4.10) and are characterized in terms of equations involving Kan extensions (Theorem 4.11).