Low distortion embeddings of some metric graphs into Banach spaces (Q2408035)

The authors consider a metric space whose ground set is \(M=\{\mathbf 0\} \cup \mathbb{N} \cup F\), where \(F=\{A\subset \mathbb{N}:~1\leq |A|<\infty\}\). The metric \(d\) on \(M\) is the shortest path metric corresponding to the following edge set: points \(a,b\) of \(M\) are adjacent if and only if \(a=\mathbf 0\) and \(b\in \mathbb{N}\) or \(a\in \mathbb{N}\), \(b \in F\) and \(a\in b\). Thus \((M,d)\) is a countable metric space. One of the main results of the paper is that a Banach space \(X\) which does not contain an isomorphic copy of \(\ell_1\) does not admit an embedding \(f:M\to X\) with distortion \(<2\) (equivalently: does not admit an embedding \(f:M\to X\) satisfying \(d(x,y) \leq ||f(x)-f(y)||\leq Dd(x,y)\) for some \(D<2\)). The authors also prove the following results on distortions of bilipschitz embeddings of \(C(K)\) spaces: For each countable ordinal \(\alpha\), the following holds: (A) The space \(C[0,\omega^\alpha]\) does not admit a bilipschitz embedding into \(C(K)\) with distortion \(<2\) if the Cantor-Bendixson derivative \(K^{(\alpha)}\) is empty; (B) The space \(C[0,\omega^{\omega^\alpha}]\) does not admit a bilipschitz embedding into a Banach space \(X\) with distortion \(<2\) if the Szlenk index of \(X\) is less than \(\omega^{\alpha+1}\).