Banach spaces which are somewhat uniformly noncreasy. (Q1410251)

It is an open question whether superreflexive Banach spaces have the fixed point property for nonexpansive mappings. Several classes of superreflexive spaces, such as spaces close enough to uniformly rotund spaces or close enough to uniformly smooth spaces, have the fixed point property because they have normal structure. In 1996, \textit{S. Prus} [Nonlinear Anal., Theory Methods Appl. 30, 2317--2324 (1997; Zbl 0899.46007)] introduced the class of uniformly noncreasy (UNC) spaces, a class of superreflexive spaces that may or may not have normal structure, and proved that they have the fixed point property. More recently, \textit{J. Garcia-Falset}, \textit{E. Llorens-Fuster}, and \textit{E. M. Mazcunan-Navarro} [Nonlinear Anal., Theory Methods Appl. 53A, 957--975 (2003; Zbl 1039.46009)] defined a more general class of superreflexive spaces called the \(r\)-UNC Banach spaces. The class of \(r\)-UNC spaces contains the uniformly nonsquare spaces and \(r\)-UNC spaces have the fixed point property if \(r\leq 1\). In this article, the authors introduce a class of Banach spaces called the somewhat uniformly noncreasy (SUNC) Banach spaces that contains the \(r\)-UNC spaces and spaces that exhibit a type of \(k\)-dimensional uniform rotundity. To be specific, a Banach space \(X\) is \((r,k)\)-somewhat uniformly noncreasy where \(r\in (0,2]\) and \(k\) is a natural number, if there exists \(\varepsilon \in (0,r)\) and \(\delta >0\) such that if \(x^*\) and \(y^*\) are norm-one elements in \(X^*\) with \(| | x^*-y^*| | \geq \varepsilon\), then the subset \(\{x\in B_X:x^*(x)\geq 1-\delta,\, y^*(x)\geq 1-\delta\}\) of the unit ball \(B_X\) of \(X\) contains no \(k\)-simplex \(\text{co} \{x_1, \ldots ,x_{k+1}\}\) with \(| | x_i - x_j| | >\varepsilon\) for \(i\neq j\). The authors give examples to distinguish this class of spaces from the \(r\)-UNC spaces and prove that SUNC spaces are superreflexive. The authors also prove that \((1,k)\)-SUNC spaces have the fixed point property.