Remarks on Priestley duality for distributive lattices

Abstract

The notion of a Priestley relation between Priestley spaces is introduced, and it is shown that there is a duality between the category of bounded distributive lattices and 0-preserving join-homomorphisms and the category of Priestley spaces and Priestley relations. When restricted to the category of bounded distributive lattices and 0-1-preserving homomorphisms, this duality yields essentially Priestley duality, and when restricted to the subcategory of Boolean algebras and 0-preserving join-homomorphisms, it coincides with the Halmos-Wright duality. It is also established a duality between 0-1-sublattices of a bounded distributive lattice and certain preorder relations on its Priestley space, which are called lattice preorders. This duality is a natural generalization of the Boolean case, and is strongly related to one considered by M. E. Adams. Connections between both kinds of dualities are studied, obtaining dualities for closure operators and quantifiers. Some results on the existence of homomorphisms lying between meet and join homomorphisms are given in the Appendix.