Choice-free duality for orthocomplemented lattices by means of spectral spaces

Abstract

The existing topological representation of an orthocomplemented lattice via the clopen orthoregular subsets of a Stone space depends upon Alexander's Subbase Theorem, which asserts that a topological space $X$ is compact if every subbasic open cover of $X$ admits of a finite subcover. This is an easy consequence of the Ultrafilter Theorem - whose proof depends upon Zorn's Lemma, which is well known to be equivalent to the Axiom of Choice. Within this work, we give a choice-free topological representation of orthocomplemented lattices by means of a special subclass of spectral spaces; choice-free in the sense that our representation avoids use of Alexander's Subbase Theorem, along with its associated nonconstructive choice principles. We then introduce a new subclass of spectral spaces which we call \emph{upper Vietoris orthospaces} in order to characterize (up to homeomorphism and isomorphism) the spectral space of proper lattice filters used in our representation. It is then shown how our constructions give rise to a choice-free dual equivalence of categories between the category of orthocomplemented lattices and the dual category of upper Vietoris orthospaces. Our duality combines Bezhanishvili and Holliday's choice-free spectral space approach to Stone duality for Boolean algebras with Goldblatt and Bimbó's choice-dependent orthospace approach to Stone duality for orthocomplemented lattices.