Ball covering property from commutative function spaces to non-commutative spaces of operators (Q2127605)

A Banach space is said to enjoy the ball covering property (BCP for short) if its unit sphere admits a countable covering by closed balls that do not meet the origin. The strong (SBCP) and uniform (UBCP) versions of BCP are present when, respectively, the radii of the balls are equi-bounded and the balls are uniformly far from the origin. Clearly, these properties make sense only for non-separable spaces and are essentially of geometrical nature. The present paper deals with such properties being enjoyed by the space \(C(K,X)\) of the continuous functions on a locally compact Hausdorff space \(K\) with values in a Banach space \(X\). The key condition is that the topology of \(K\) admits a countable weak basis (\(K\) enjoys the CwB for short). More precisely, the authors prove that: \begin{itemize} \item[--] \(C(K,\mathbb R)\) enjoys UBCP if and only if \(K\) enjoys CwB; \item[--] \(C(K,X)\) enjoys BCP if and only if \(K\) enjoys CwB and \(X\) enjoys BCP; the same when BCP is replaced by SBCP or UBCP. \end{itemize} Moreover, they prove that if the space \(\mathcal B (X,Y)\) of the bounded operators from the Banach space \(X\) to the Banach space \(Y\) enjoys BCP, then both \(X^*\) and \(Y\) do. From the abstract of the paper: ``In particular, these results imply that \(\mathcal B (c_0)\), \(\mathcal B (\ell_1)\) and every subspace containing finite rank operators in \(\mathcal B (\ell_p)\) for \(1 < p < \infty\) all have the BCP, and \(\mathcal B (L_1[0,1])\) fails the BCP. Using those characterizations and results, we show that BCP is not hereditary for 1-complemented subspaces (even for completely 1-complemented subspaces in operator space sense) by constructing two different counterexamples.''