Ultrafilter spaces and compactifications (Q2706901)

Given a topological space \((X,T),\) let \({\mathcal U}(X)\) be the set of all ultrafilters defined on \(X\). The author considers the well-known ultrafilter space \(({\mathcal U}(X),{\mathcal U}(T))\) generated by the topology \(T\). The set of basic open sets for \({\mathcal U}(X)\) is generated by taking each \(G \in T\) and considering as a basic open set for a topology \({\mathcal U}(T)\) the set of all \(U \in {\mathcal U}(X)\) such that \(G \in U.\) Although the author does not mention it in this paper, if \(^*X\) is the nonstandard extension of \(X\) in an enlargement, then the author's ultrafilter space is homeomorphic to \(^*X\) with the Robinson S-topology defined. This paper is very closely associated with this notion from nonstandard analysis. It is known that this ultrafilter space is compact and locally compact. The author further investigates this space relative to some standard compactifications such as the Stone-Čech and \(T_0\)-stable compactifications. The author uses various mappings to achieve many of the goals of this paper. For example, the map that identifies the members of \(X\) with the principal ultrafilters in \({\mathcal U}(X)\) is shown to map \((X,T)\) homeomorphically onto a patch-dense subspace of \(({\mathcal U}(X),{\mathcal U}(T)).\)