The category of well-filtered dcpos is not $\Gamma$-faithful

Abstract

The Ho-Zhao problem asks whether any two dcpo's with isomorphic Scott closed set lattices are themselves isomorphic, that is, whether the category $\mathbf{DCPO}$ of dcpo's and Scott-continuous maps is $\Gamma$-faithful. In 2018, Ho, Goubault-Larrecq, Jung and Xi answered this question in the negative, and they introduced the category $\mathbf{DOMI}$ of dominated dcpo's and proved that it is {$\Gamma$-faithful}. Dominated dcpo's subsume many familiar families of dcpo's in domain theory, such as the category of bounded-complete dcpo's and that of sober dcpo's, among others. However, it is unknown whether the category of dominated dcpo's dominates all well-filtered dcpo's, a class strictly larger than that of bounded-complete lattices and that of sober dcpo's. In this paper, we address this very natural question and show that the category $\mathbf{WF}$ of well-filtered dcpo's is not $\Gamma$-faithful, and as a result of it, well-filtered dcpo's need not be dominated in general. Since not all dcpo's are well-filtered, our work refines the results of Ho, Goubault-Larrecq, Jung and Xi. As a second contribution, we confirm that the Lawson's category of $\Omega^{*}$-compact dcpo's is $\Gamma$-faithful. Moreover, we locate a class of dcpo's which we call weakly dominated dcpo's, and show that this class is $\Gamma$-faithful and strictly larger than $\mathbf{DOMI}$.