Grothendieck topologies on a poset

Abstract

We investigate Grothendieck topologies (in the sense of sheaf theory) on a poset $\P$ that are generated by some subset of $\P$. We show that such Grothendieck topologies exhaust all possibilities if and only if $\P$ is Artinian. If $\P$ is not Artinian, other families of Grothendieck topologies on $\P$ exist that are not generated by some subset of $\P$, but even those are related to the Grothendieck topologies generated by subsets. Furthermore, we investigate several notions of equivalences of Grothendieck topologies, and using a posetal version of the Comparison Lemma, a sheaf-theoretic result known as the Comparison Lemma, going back to Grothendieck et al \cite{SGA4}, we calculate the sheaves with respect to most of the Grothendieck topologies we have found.