Free Products of Banach Lattices

We study free products, that is, coproducts, in the category of Banach lattices and contractive lattice homomorphisms. We give a concrete construction of the free product of an arbitrary family of Banach lattices as a quotient of a free Banach lattice, and prove its basic structural properties. We also establish stability results for sublattice embeddings and projective Banach lattices, and also analyze the behavior of quotient maps. For compact Hausdorff spaces $K_1$ and $K_2$ we identify $C(K_1)\ast C(K_2)$ lattice isomorphically with $C(K_1\ast K_2)$, where $K_1\ast K_2$ denotes the topological join, and we derive an explicit formula for the free product norm in this representation. We further discuss free factors of free Banach lattices, and exploit the existence of non-trivial homological spheres to show that a free Banach lattice can have free factors which are not isomorphic to free Banach lattices.