Complementation and decompositions in some weakly Lindelöf Banach spaces

Abstract

AbstractLet Γ denote an uncountable set. We consider the questions if a Banach space X of the form C(K) of a given class (1) has a complemented copy of c0(Γ) or (2) for every c0(Γ)⊆X has a complemented c0(E) for an uncountable E⊆Γ or (3) has a decomposition X=A⊕B where both A and B are nonseparable. The results concern a superclass of the class of nonmetrizable Eberlein compacts, namely Ks such that C(K) is Lindelöf in the weak topology and we restrict our attention to Ks scattered of countable height. We show that the answers to all these questions for these C(K)s depend on additional combinatorial axioms which are independent of ZFC±CH. If we assume the P-ideal dichotomy, for every c0(Γ)⊆C(K) there is a complemented c0(E) for an uncountable E⊆Γ, which yields the positive answer to the remaining questions. If we assume ♣, then we construct a nonseparable weakly Lindelöf C(K) for K of height ω+1 where every operator is of the form cI+S for c∈R and S with separable range and conclude from this that there are no decompositions as above which yields the negative answer to all the above questions. Since, in the case of a scattered compact K, the weak topology on C(K) and the pointwise convergence topology coincide on bounded sets, and so the Lindelöf properties of these two topologies are equivalent, many results concern also the space Cp(K)