Locales in presheaf toposes vs. presheaves of locales

Abstract

By a well-known characterisation, in a presheaf topos every internal suplattice is a presheaf of suplattices, but not every presheaf of suplattices is an internal suplattice (and similarly for frames). In this paper, we construct the free internal suplattice/frame on an presheaf of suplattices/frames, yielding a left adjoint to the forgetful functor from the respective internal structures to presheaves of structures. The description of this left adjoint has also appeared in recent work of Henry and Townsend, in connection to a different universal property, namely that of turning a lax natural transformation between poset-enriched functors to a strict one. As an application of our construction, we investigate conditions on frames internal to a presheaf topos, such as being locally compact, compact, stably locally compact or Hausdorff, in terms of properties of their sections in the base topos. In the first three cases, it is necessary that all the sections have the respective properties, while the Hausdorff property is not transferred to the sections. Moreover for local compactness it is necessary that the transition maps preserve the way-below relation. Finally, for an internal locally compact frame in presheaves we analyse the connection of its way-below relation to the respective relations of its sections.