Some remarks on the ball-covering property (Q2320096)

It is well known that any finite covering of the unit sphere \(S_X\) of a Banach space \((X,\| \cdot \|)\) by balls contains the origin (so it must cover the whole unit ball \(B_X\)). That led many authors to investigate conditions under which it is possibile to cover \(S_X\) by some countable family of open balls missing the origin or even being uniformly far from it. In this paper, the authors formalize a quantitative version of a more general property in the following way. For \(\alpha \in [-1,1)\), the Banach space \((X,\| \cdot \|)\) has the \(\alpha\)-ball covering property (\(\alpha\)-BCP in short) whenever there exists a countable subset \(A\) of \(X\) such that for every \(x \in S_X\) there exists \(a \in A\) with \(\|a \| - \| a-x \| > \alpha\). Then they define the parameter \(bc(X)\) in a form equivalent to the following one: \[bc(X) =\mathrm{sup}\{ \alpha \in [-1,1): X \ \text{has the }\alpha \text{-BCP}\}.\] Besides recovering some known results, the authors state the following interesting ones. \begin{itemize} \item[(i)] \(X\) is separable iff, for every \(\epsilon >0\), there exists an \((1+\epsilon )\)-equivalent norm on \(X\) under which \(bc(X^*) = 1\). \item[(ii)] Let \(X=C(K)^*\) for a compact Hausdorff space \(K\). Then either \(X\) is separable and \(BC(X)=1\), or \(X\) is non-separable and fails the \((-1)\)-BCP. \item[(iii)] Let \(X\) be an \(L\)-space. Then \(X\) has the \((-1)\)-BCP iff \(X\) has a weak unit, iff \(X\) is \(WCG\), iff \(X\) does not contain an isometric copy of \(\ell_1(\Gamma)\) for any uncountable \(\Gamma\). \end{itemize}