Relatively weakly open sets in closed balls of Banach spaces, and the centralizer (Q1022327)

An infinite-dimensional Banach space \(X\) is said to have the ``diameter 2'' property if every nonempty relatively weakly open subset of the closed unit ball has diameter~2. \textit{O. Nygaard} and \textit{D. Werner} showed that any infinite dimensional uniform algebra has this property [Arch. Math. 76, No. 6, 441--444 (2001; Zbl 0994.46006)]. This property, in particular, implies that the unit ball can not have stronger extremal structure like denting points. The authors and their collaborators have in the recent past exhibited several classes of Banach spaces having this property. In the current paper, they look at this aspect from the point of view of the centralizer \(Z(X)\) of a Banach space. For any Banach space failing this property, \(Z(X)\) is finite-dimensional and this is also a necessary condition in the case of a dual space. In Section 3, these ideas are applied to spaces of operators and tensor products. For example, if the injective product space \(X \otimes_{\varepsilon}Y\) fails this property, then both \(Z(X^{\ast\ast})\) and \(Z(Y^{\ast\ast})\) are finite-dimensional.