Properly injective spaces and function spaces

Given an injective space D (a continuous lattice endowed with the Scott topology) and a subspace embedding j : X → Y, Dana Scott asked whether the higher-order function [X → D] → [Y → D] which takes a continuous map f : X → D to its greatest continuous extension f : Y → D along j is Scott continuous. In this case the extension map is a subspace embedding. We show that the extension map is Scott continuous iff D is the trivial one-point space or j is a proper map in the sense of Hofmann and Lawson. In order to avoid the ambiguous expression "proper subspace embedding", we refer to proper maps as finitary maps. We show that the finitary sober subspaces of the injective spaces are exactly the stably locally compact spaces. Moreover, the injective spaces over finitary embeddings are the algebras of the upper power space monad on the category of sober spaces. These coincide with the retracts of upper power spaces of sober spaces. In the full subcategory of locally compact sober spaces, these are known to be the continuous meet-semilattices. In the full subcategory of stably locally compact spaces these are again the continuous lattices. The above characterization of the injective spaces over finitary embeddings is an instance of a general result on injective objects in poset-enriched categories with the structure of a KZ-monad established in this paper, which we also apply to various full subcategories closed under the upper power space construction and to the upper and lower power locale monads. The above results also hold for the injective spaces over dense subspace embeddings (continuous Scott domains). Moreover, we show that every sober space has a smallest finitary dense sober subspace (its support). The support always contains the subspace of maximal points, and in the stably locally compact case (which includes densely injective spaces) it is the subspace of maximal points iff that subspace is compact.