Intermediate rings of complex-valued continuous functions

Abstract

<p>For a completely regular Hausdorff topological space X, let C(X, C) be the ring of complex-valued continuous functions on X, let C ∗ (X, C) be its subring of bounded functions, and let Σ(X, C) denote the collection of all the rings that lie between C ∗ (X, C) and C(X, C). We show that there is a natural correlation between the absolutely convex ideals/ prime ideals/maximal ideals/z-ideals/z ◦ -ideals in the rings P(X, C) in Σ(X, C) and in their real-valued counterparts P(X, C) ∩ C(X). These correlations culminate to the fact that the structure space of any such P(X, C) is βX. For any ideal I in C(X, C), we observe that C ∗ (X, C)+I is a member of Σ(X, C), which is further isomorphic to a ring of the type C(Y, C). Incidentally these are the only C-type intermediate rings in Σ(X, C) if and only if X is pseudocompact. We show that for any maximal ideal M in C(X, C), C(X, C)/M is an algebraically closed field, which is furthermore the algebraic closure of C(X)/M ∩C(X). We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the ideal CP (X, C) of C(X, C), which consists of all those functions whose support lie on an ideal P of closed sets in X, to be a prime ideal, and we examine a few special cases thereafter. At the end of the article, we find estimates for a few standard parameters concerning the zero-divisor graphs of a P(X, C) in Σ(X, C).</p>