Weakly compact homomorphisms of regular Banach algebras (Q1002813)

Let \(A\) be a regular simple complex commutative Banach algebra and \(M_A\) be its maximal ideal space. For any \(\varphi \in M_A\), let \(I_{\varphi}\) and \(J_{\varphi}\) be, respectively, the largest and the smallest closed ideals in \(A\) with hull \(\{\varphi\}\). Then \(A\) is a Ditkin algebra iff \(I_{\varphi}= J_{\varphi}\) for every \(\varphi \in M_A\) and \(A\) is the closure of the set \(A_{00}\), which consists of all \(a \in A\) with supp \(\hat{a}\) compact. It is shown that every weakly compact homomorphism of a uniformly regular Ditkin algebra into a Banach algebra is finite-dimensional.