Residuality in the set of norm attaining operators between Banach spaces (Q2100719)

This interesting paper presents a number of new results on the relationship, for a Banach space \(X\), between the residuality in \(X^*\) of the subset of all norm attaining functionals on \(X\) and the residuality and the denseness of the subset \(\mathrm{NA}(X, Y) \subset L(X, Y)\) of all norm attaining operators between \(X\) and another Banach space \(Y\). The paper consists of five sections. The introductory section contains terminology, notations, a short survey of the theory of norm-attainment, Lindenstrauss's properties A and B, and the role of the Radon-Nikodým property in that theory. The section also contains some preliminary results. Section 2 ``Necessary conditions for the Bishop-Phelps property and for property A'' is devoted to the proof of the first main result: if a Banach space \(X\) admits a LUR renorming and \(C \subset X\) is a bounded subset with the Bishop-Phelps property, then the set \(\mathrm{SE}(C)\) of strongly exposing \(C\) functionals is dense in \(X^*\). In particular, \(C\) is contained in the closed convex hull of its strongly exposed points. (By the definition, \(C\) has the Bishop-Phelps property if, for every Banach space \(Y\), the set of operators \(T \in L(X, Y)\) for which \(\sup_{x \in C}\|T x \|\) is attained is dense in \(L(X, Y)\).) This result and its consequences improve several previously known results by J.~Bourgain, K.-S.~Lau and J.~Lindenstrauss. An operator \(T \in L(X, Y)\) is called absolutely strongly exposing if there exists \(x \in B_X\) such that for every sequence of \(x_n \in B_X\) with \(\|Tx_n\| \xrightarrow[n \to \infty]{} \|T\|\) there exists a sequence of modulus-one scalars \(\theta_n\) such that \(\theta_n x_n \xrightarrow[n \to \infty]{} x\). Section~3 of the paper studies conditions on the space \(Y\) ensuring that the set \(\mathrm{ASE}(X, Y) \subset L(X, Y)\) of absolutely strongly exposing operators is dense provided the set of \(\mathrm{SE}(B_X)\) is dense in \(X^*\). The results include examples in which even the denseness of \(\mathrm{NA}(X, Y)\) in \(L(X, Y)\) was unknown. In Section 4 the authors show that the residuality of \(\textrm{NA}(X, Y)\) in \( L(X, Y)\) implies the denseness of \(\mathrm{ASE}(X, Y) \subset L(X, Y)\) provided the domain space and the dual of the range space are separable, extending a recent result by \textit{A.~J. Guirao} et al. [Stud. Math. 241, No.~1, 71--86 (2018; Zbl 1397.46009)] for functionals. Finally, Section~5 presents applications to the geometry of Lipschitz-free spaces, to strongly norm attaining Lipschitz maps, and to norm attaining bilinear forms. In particular, the authors demonstrate that the Lipschitz-free space on the Euclidean unit circle fails to have property A, thus solving an implicit open problem from [\textit{R.~Chiclana} et al., Rev. Mat. Iberoam. 37, No.~5, 1917--1951 (2021; Zbl 1506.46009)], which was the initial motivation for their study.