The spectrum of a localic semiring

Abstract

AbstractA number of spectrum constructions have been devised to extract topological spaces from algebraic data. Prominent examples include the Zariski spectrum of a commutative ring, the Stone spectrum of a bounded distributive lattice, the Gelfand spectrum of a commutative unital C*-algebra and the Hofmann–Lawson spectrum of a continuous frame.Inspired by the examples above, we define a spectrum for localic semirings. We use arguments in the symmetric monoidal category of suplattices to prove that, under conditions satisfied by the aforementioned examples, the spectrum can be constructed as the frame of overt weakly closed radical ideals and that it reduces to the usual constructions in those cases. Our proofs are constructive.Our approach actually gives ‘quantalic’ spectrum from which the more familiar localic spectrum can then be derived. For a discrete ring this yields the quantale of ideals and in general should contain additional ‘differential’ information about the semiring.