Cowellpoweredness and closure operators in categories of coarse spaces (Q2334019)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problem of wellpoweredness and cowellpoweredness in categories that come from coarse geometry. \textit{Coarse spaces} are pairs \((X,\mathcal E)\), where \(X\) is a set and \(\mathcal E \subseteq \mathcal P(X\times X)\) is a coarse structure, i.e. a family of relations on \(X\), called entourages, which contains the diagonal \(\Delta_X\) and is closed under taking subsets, finite unions, composites and inverses. The morphisms of the category \(\mathbf{Coarse}\) of coarse spaces are the \textit{bornologous maps}, i.e., maps between coarse spaces that send entourages to entourages. \(\mathbf{Coarse}/_{\sim}\) is a quotient category of \(\mathbf{Coarse}\) under the closeness relation \(\sim\) between morphisms: two maps \(f,g\colon S\to (X,\mathcal E)\) from a set \(S\) to a coarse space \((X,\mathcal E)\) are \textit{close} if \(\{(f(x),g(x)) \mid x \in X\} \in\mathcal E\). The main results of the paper are the following: Theorem A. Every epireflective subcategory of \(\mathbf{Coarse}\) is cowellpowered. Theorem B. The category \(\mathbf{Coarse}/_{\sim}\) is both wellpowered and cowellpowered. Theorem A is proved using the following complete characterization of closure operators in \(\mathbf{Coarse}\): Theorem C. The only proper closure operator in \(\mathbf{Coarse}\) is \(\mathcal Q = (\mathcal Q_X)_{X\in\mathbf{Coarse}}\), where \(\mathcal Q_X(M)\) is the smallest union of connected components of \(X\) that contains \(M\). As a byproduct of Theorem C, the extremely epireflective subcategories of \(\mathbf{Coarse}\) are classified. The situation with \(\mathbf{Coarse}/_{\sim}\) is more complicated: while \(\mathbf{Coarse}/_{\sim}\) has arbitrary products, in general it has neither equalizers, nor pullbacks, nor pullbacks of subobjects.