D-Ultrafilters and their Monads

Abstract

For a number of locally finitely presentable categories K we describe the codensity monad of the full embedding of all finitely presentable objects into K. We introduce the concept of D-ultrafilter on an object, where D is a "nice" cogenerator of K. We prove that the codensity monad assigns to every object an object representing all D-ultrafilters on it. Our result covers e.g. categories of sets, vector spaces, posets, semilattices, graphs and M-sets for finite commutative monoids M.