Étale groupoids and their quantales (Q854099)

The paper is based on the observation that the set \(\mathcal O(G)\) of open sets of a topological (localic) groupoid \(G\) carries the multiplication given by that of \(G\) and the involution given by taking inverses in \(G\). The author succeeds to characterize the resulting involutive quantales \(\mathcal O(G)\) by introducing the new and very interesting concepts of supported and inverse quantales. This leads to a bijective correspondence between localic étale groupoids and inverse quantale frames. Since the category of inverse quantale frames is equivalent to the category of complete and infinitely distributive monoids, the author generalizes more classical results concerning inverse semigroups and topological groupoids.