Bottlenecks in dendroids (Q1873729)

A (metric) continuum is hereditarily unicoherent if the intersection of any two of its subcontinua is connected. An arcwise connected and hereditarily unicoherent continuum is called a dendroid. A subcontinuum \(C\) of a dendroid \(X\) is called a bottleneck if there are two nonempty open sets \(U\) and \(V\) both open in \(X\) such that \(uv \cap C \neq \emptyset\) for each \(u \in U\) and \(v \in V\). The sets \(U\) and \(V\) are called basins of the bottleneck \(C\). It is shown that every dendroid \(X\) has three distinct points \(a\), \(b\) and \(p\) such that \(p\) is contained in arbitrarily small bottlenecks with each of their two basins containing one of the points \(a\) and \(b\). Moreover, every plane dendroid contains a single point bottleneck. As corollaries it follows that (a) if \(f: K \to X\) is an arbitrary mapping from a Knaster continuum or a solenoid \(K\) into a dendroid \(X\), then there is a point \(x \in X\) such that \(f^{-1}(x)\) consists of at least three points; (b) each mapping from an indecomposable continuum into a plane a dendroid must have an uncountable point-inverse. The author constructs a mapping from the simplest indecomposable Knaster continuum \(K\) onto a dendroid \(D\) such that \(f^{-1}(d)\) consists of at most three points. The results give a partial negative answer to a question of \textit{Jo Heath} and \textit{V. C. Nall} (preprint) whether there is an indecomposable continuum that admits a mapping onto a dendroid such that the inverse of each point of the range contains at most two points.