Free meets and atomic assemblies of frames (Q987177)

In his PhD Thesis [The assembly tower and some categorical and algebraic aspects of frame theory. Carnegie Mellon University (1994)], \textit{J. T. Wilson} defined a subset \(S\) of a frame \(L\) to \textit{have free meets} if for each frame homomorphism \(h:L\rightarrow M\), \(h(\bigwedge S)=\bigwedge h(S)\). He then proved that a frame \(L\) has free meets (that is, every \(S\subseteq L\) has free meets) if and only if \(L\) is a co-frame (that is, it satisfies the dual distributive frame law) and the assembly \(\mathbb{N}L\) of \(L\) (that is, the frame of nuclei defined on \(L\), ordered pointwise) is Boolean. In the paper under review, the authors say that \(S\subseteq L\) has \({\mathcal H}\)-free meets (for a given class \(\mathcal H\) of frame homomorphisms whose domain is \(L\)) if \(h(\bigwedge S)=\bigwedge h(S)\) for each \(h\in{\mathcal H}\). Then, using Conrad's Theorem on complete lattices that are freely generated by their meet-irreducible elements, they show that the following are equivalent for a frame \(L\): {\parindent=6mm \begin{itemize}\item[(1)] \(L\) has free meets and \(\mathbb{N}L\) is atomic. \item[(2)] \(L\) has \({\mathcal H}\)-free meets for \({\mathcal H}=\{\)surjective frame homomorphisms\(\}\), and is spatial. \item[(3)] \(L\) is freely generated by the subset of meet-irreducible elements, which satisfies the descending chain condition. \item[(4)] \(L\) is a co-frame and \(\mathbb{N}L\) is an atomic Boolean frame. \end{itemize}} Further, the frames with free meets and atomic assembly, for which the canonical embedding into the assembly is coherent, are characterized: they are precisely the algebraic frames that can be coherently and completely embedded in an atomic Boolean frame.