Natural dualities in partnership

Traditionally in natural duality theory the algebras carry no topology and the objects on the dual side are structured Boolean spaces. Given a duality, one may ask when the topology can be swapped to the other side to yield a partner duality (or, better, a dual equivalence) between a category of topological algebras and a category of structures. A prototype for this procedure is provided by the passage from Priestley duality for bounded distributive lattices to Banaschewski duality for ordered sets. Moreover, the partnership between these two dualities yields as a spinoff a factorisation of the functor sending a bounded distributive lattice to its natural extension, alias, in this case, the canonical extension or profinite completion. The main theorem of this paper validates topology swapping as a uniform way to create new dual adjunctions and dual equivalences: we prove that, for every finite algebra of finite type, each dualising alter ego gives rise to a partner duality. We illustrate the theorem via a variety of natural dualities, some classic and some less familiar. For lattice-based algebras this leads immediately, as in the Priestley-Banaschewski example, to a concrete description of canonical extensions. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.