Topological duality and lattice expansions, I: A topological construction of canonical extensions

The two main objectives of this paper are (a) to prove purely topological duality theorems for semilattices and bounded lattices, and (b) to show that the topological duality from (a) provides a construction of canonical extensions of bounded lattices. In previously known dualities for semilattices and bounded lattices, the dual spaces are compact 0-dimensional spaces with additional algebraic structure. For example, semilattices are dual to 0-dimensional compact semilattices. Here we establish dual categories in which the spaces are characterized purely in topological terms, with no additional algebraic structure. Thus the results can be seen as generalizing Stone’s duality for distributive lattices rather than Priestley’s. The paper is the first of two parts. The main objective of the sequel is to establish a characterization of lattice expansions, i.e., lattices with additional operations, in the topological setting built in this paper.