Isocompactness in the category of locales. (Q2254579)

This paper is devoted to the study of isocompactness in pointfree topology. First, a locale is declared to be \textit{isocompact} whenever each of its countably compact closed sublocales is compact. This is clearly a conservative extension of the notion of isocompact topological space, in the sense that a space is isocompact if and only if its locale of open sets is isocompact. Then, it is shown that every paracompact locale is isocompact, that there are non-spatial isocompact locales and that any locale which is a countable join of closed isocompact sublocales is itself isocompact (thus, any \(F_\sigma\)-sublocale of an isocompact locale is isocompact). Regarding morphisms, it is shown that in case the domain of a nearly perfect localic surjection is isocompact, then so is its codomain, and if the codomain of any proper map of locales is isocompact, then so is its domain. The following two stronger variants of isocompactness are also considered: (1) A locale is \textit{closure-isocompact} if the closure of every complemented countably compact sublocale is compact. (2) A locale is \textit{fully closure-isocompact} if the closure of every countably compact sublocale is compact. Inside perfectly normal locales the three variants are indistinguishable. Again, paracompact locales are fully closure-isocompact. Complemented \(F_\sigma\)-sublocales of completely regular closure-isocompact locales are closure-isocompact (the problem whether the restriction to complemented sublocales can be removed is left open). The behaviour of each of the stronger variants of isocompactness with respect to nearly perfect localic maps and proper maps is somewhat dual to the behaviour of isocompactness: in case the codomain of a nearly perfect localic map is fully closure-isocompact (resp. closure-isocompact, and the map is a sublocale inclusion of a complemented sublocale), then so is its domain, and if the domain of any proper surjection of locales is fully closure-isocompact (resp. closure-isocompact), then so is its codomain. The last result of the paper asserts that the product of two regular fully closure-isocompact locales is fully closure-isocompact.