Ionads

The notion of Grothendieck topos may be considered as a generalisation of that of topological space, one in which the points of the space may have non-trivial automorphisms. However, the analogy is not precise, since in a topological space, it is the points which have conceptual priority over the open sets, whereas in a topos it is the other way around. Hence a topos is more correctly regarded as a generalised locale, than as a generalised space. In this article we introduce the notion of ionad, which stands in the same relationship to a topological space as a (Grothendieck) topos does to a locale. We develop basic aspects of their theory and discuss their relationship with toposes.Comment: 24 pages; v2: diverse revisions; v3: chopped about in face of trenchant and insightful referee feedbac

Bohrification

New foundations for quantum logic and quantum spaces are constructed by merging algebraic quantum theory and topos theory. Interpreting Bohr's "doctrine of classical concepts" mathematically, given a quantum theory described by a noncommutative C*-algebra A, we construct a topos T(A), which contains the "Bohrification" B of A as an internal commutative C*-algebra. Then B has a spectrum, a locale internal to T(A), the external description S(A) of which we interpret as the "Bohrified" phase space of the physical system. As in classical physics, the open subsets of S(A) correspond to (atomic) propositions, so that the "Bohrified" quantum logic of A is given by the Heyting algebra structure of S(A). The key difference between this logic and its classical counterpart is that the former does not satisfy the law of the excluded middle, and hence is intuitionistic. When A contains sufficiently many projections (e.g. when A is a von Neumann algebra, or, more generally, a Rickart C*-algebra), the intuitionistic quantum logic S(A) of A may also be compared with the traditional quantum logic, i.e. the orthomodular lattice of projections in A. This time, the main difference is that the former is distributive (even when A is noncommutative), while the latter is not. This chapter is a streamlined synthesis of 0709.4364, 0902.3201, 0905.2275.Comment: 44 pages; a chapter of the first author's PhD thesis, to appear in "Deep Beauty" (ed. H. Halvorson

Localic Metric spaces and the localic Gelfand duality

In this paper we prove, as conjectured by B.Banachewski and C.J.Mulvey, that the constructive Gelfand duality can be extended into a duality between compact regular locales and unital abelian localic C*-algebras. In order to do so we develop a constructive theory of localic metric spaces and localic Banach spaces, we study the notion of localic completion of such objects and the behaviour of these constructions with respect to pull-back along geometric morphisms.Comment: 57 page

Groupoid sheaves as quantale sheaves

Several notions of sheaf on various types of quantale have been proposed and studied in the last twenty five years. It is fairly standard that for an involutive quantale Q satisfying mild algebraic properties the sheaves on Q can be defined to be the idempotent self-adjoint Q-valued matrices. These can be thought of as Q-valued equivalence relations, and, accordingly, the morphisms of sheaves are the Q-valued functional relations. Few concrete examples of such sheaves are known, however, and in this paper we provide a new one by showing that the category of equivariant sheaves on a localic etale groupoid G (the classifying topos of G) is equivalent to the category of sheaves on its involutive quantale O(G). As a means towards this end we begin by replacing the category of matrix sheaves on Q by an equivalent category of complete Hilbert Q-modules, and we approach the envisaged example where Q is an inverse quantal frame O(G) by placing it in the wider context of stably supported quantales, on one hand, and in the wider context of a module theoretic description of arbitrary actions of \'etale groupoids, both of which may be interesting in their own right.Comment: 62 pages. Structure of preprint has changed. It now contains the contents of former arXiv:0807.3859 (withdrawn), and the definition of Q-sheaf applies only to inverse quantal frames (Hilbert Q-modules with enough sections are given no special name for more general quantales

The Glueing Construction and Double Categories

We introduce Artin-Wraith glueing and locally closed inclusions in double categories. Examples include locales, toposes, topological spaces, categories, and posets. With appropriate assumptions, we show that locally closed inclusions are exponentiable, and the exponentials are constructed via Artin-Wraith glueing. Thus, we obtain a single theorem establishing the exponentiability of locally closed inclusions in these five cases.Comment: 19 pages, presented at CT201

The connected Vietoris powerlocale

The connected Vietoris powerlocale is defined as a strong monad Vc on the category of locales. VcX is a sublocale of Johnstone's Vietoris powerlocale VX, a localic analogue of the Vietoris hyperspace, and its points correspond to the weakly semifitted sublocales of X that are “strongly connected”. A product map ×:VcX×VcY→Vc(X×Y) shows that the product of two strongly connected sublocales is strongly connected. If X is locally connected then VcX is overt. For the localic completion of a generalized metric space Y, the points of are certain Cauchy filters of formal balls for the finite power set with respect to a Vietoris metric. \ud Application to the point-free real line gives a choice-free constructive version of the Intermediate Value Theorem and Rolle's Theorem. \ud \ud The work is topos-valid (assuming natural numbers object). Vc is a geometric constructio