On quasi norm attaining operators between Banach spaces (Q2144430)

Motivated by a paper of \textit{G. Godefroy} [Pure Appl. Funct. Anal. 1, No.~1, 39--46 (2016; Zbl 1362.46026)], the authors study the so-called quasi norm-attainment (see Definition~1.1 and Definition~1.2). They say that a bounded linear operator \(T: X \rightarrow Y\) quasi attains its norm whenever \(\overline{T(B_X)} \cap \|T\| S_Y \not= \emptyset\). The set of all operators from \(X\) into \(Y\) which quasi attain their norms is denoted by \(\mbox{QNA}(X, Y)\) while \(\mbox{NA}(X, Y)\) stands for the set of all norm attaining operators (in the classical sense). The paper starts with several remarks concerning quasi norm attaining operators. For instance, the observations that every norm attaining as well as every compact operator from \(X\) into \(Y\) belongs to \(\mbox{QNA}(X, Y)\) bring up the first natural questions such as, for instance, when do the sets \(\mbox{NA}(X, Y)\) and \(\mbox{QNA}(X, Y)\) coincide (see Sections~2 and~4) and when is the set \(\mbox{QNA}(X, Y)\) dense in the whole space \(\mathcal{L}(X, Y)\) (see Section~3). The main theorem of the paper yields several relevant consequences when it comes to the Radon-Nikodým property (see Theorem~3.1). The natural question of what happens when \(X\) or \(Y\) are reflexive spaces is covered by Corollary~3.5, which proves the fact that if \(X\) or \(Y\) has the Radon-Nikodým property, then \(\mbox{QNA}(X, Y)\) is a dense subset. The result stated in Corollary~3.8, which provides a characterization of the Radon-Nikodým property in terms of the denseness of the set \(\mbox{QNA}(X, Y)\), shows that the classical and quasi norm attainment differ even when one deals with natural properties like the Radon-Nikodým property. This also shows that studying the set \(\mbox{QNA}(X, Y)\) is a non-trivial task (see also Example~1.3), relevant for the norm attaining theory and therefore might yield contributions for this field in the near future. The authors also improve some results due to \textit{J. Bourgain} [Isr. J. Math. 28, 265--271 (1977; Zbl 0365.46021)] and \textit{R. Huff} [Rev. Roum. Math. Pures Appl. 25, 239--241 (1980; Zbl 0434.46004)].