On a variant of extremal disconnectedness in locales and spaces

Abstract

We study a variant of extremal disconnectedness in frames, defined by requiring that any two disjoint open sublocales should be separable by disjoint open sublocales each of which is the interior of some zero-sublocale. In spaces, this notion was recently introduced in [1] in order to study some properties of frames of z-ideals of rings of continuous functions. The point-free approach adopted here brings to the fore some topological results not considered in [1], such as that a dense z-embedded subspace of a Tychonoff space has this property if and only if the space containing it has the property. In [1], this was proved only for the embedding X ⊆ βX. We give a ring-theoretic characterization by defining a property of f-rings in a transparent manner which shows why the property should be defined the way we do. The property is that if two annihilator ideals meet trivially, then the annihilator of each of the annihilator ideals contains a positive element such that the sum of the two elements is a non-zerodivisor.