Characterizations of ideals in intermediate \(C\)-rings \(A(X)\) via the \(A\)-compactifications of \(X\) (Q2448829)

Summary: Let \(X\) be a completely regular topological space. An intermediate ring is a ring \(A(X)\) of continuous functions satisfying \(C^\ast(X)\subseteq A(X)\subseteq C(X)\). In Redlin and Watson (1987) and in Panman et al. (2012), correspondences \(\mathcal Z_A\) and \(\mathfrak Z_A\) are defined between ideals in \(A(X)\) and \(z\)-filters on \(X\), and it is shown that these extend the well-known correspondences studied separately for \(C^\ast(X)\) and \(C(X)\), respectively, to any intermediate ring. Moreover, the inverse map \(\mathcal Z^{\leftarrow}_A\) sets up a one-one correspondence between the maximal ideals of \(A(X)\) and the \(z\)-ultrafilters on \(X\). In this paper, we define a function \(\mathfrak K_A\) that, in the case that \(A(X)\) is a \(C\)-ring, describes \(\mathfrak Z_A\) in terms of extensions of functions to realcompactifications of \(X\). For such rings, we show that \(\mathcal Z^{\leftarrow}_A\) maps \(z\)-filters to ideals. We also give a characterization of the maximal ideals in \(A(X)\) that generalize the Gelfand-Kolmogorov theorem from \(C(X)\) to \(A(X)\).