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David Carchedi
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Automorphism groups and etale topological stacks

Recall that an etale topological stack is a stack $\mathscr{X}$ over the category of topological spaces (and open covers) which admits a representable local homeomorphism $X \to \mathscr{X}$ from a topological space. Equivalently, it is a topological stack arising from an etale topological groupoid. It is well known that a differentiable stack is etale if and only if all of its automorphism groups are discrete, but the proof involves foliation theory. It seems this proof cannot be extended to the topological setting. However, clearly every etale topological stack has discrete isotropy groups. This begs the question:

If a topological stack has all of its isotropy groups discrete, is it necessarily etale?

EDIT: By a topological stack, I mean a stack $\mathscr{X}$ over the category of topological spaces (and open covers) which admits a representable epimorphism $X \to \mathscr{X}$ (not necessarily a local homeomorphism). This is equivalent to saying $\mathscr{X}$ is the stack of torsors for a topological groupoid.

Remark: This question is equivalent to asking if a topological groupoid all of whose isotropy groups are discrete must be Morita equivalent to an etale topological groupoid.

David Carchedi
  • 15.5k
  • 38
  • 99