Singularities of meager composants and filament composants (Q2415949)

A continuum is a non-degenerate compact connected metric space. Given a continuum $Y$ a subcontinuum $A$ of $Y$ is filament if there exists a neighborhood of $A$ in which the connected component of $A$ is nowhere dense. Given a point $p\in Y$, the composant of $p$ in $Y$ is the union of all the proper subcontinua of $Y$ containing $p$. The meager composant of $p$ in $Y$ is the union of all nowhere dense subcontinua of $Y$ containing $p$, and the filament composant of $p$ in $Y$ is the union of all filament subcontinua of $Y$ containing $p$. A connected subset $X$ of a continuum $Y$ is singular in $Y$ if there exists a point $p\in Y$ with the following property: for every connected subset $C$ of $X$ such that $p$ is in the closure of $C$ (with respect of $Y$), we have that $C$ is dense in $X$. The continuum $Y$ is decomposable if $Y$ can be put as the union of two proper subcontinua, if $Y$ is not decomposable, then $Y$ is indecomposable. Indecomposable continua are pretty well studied. In particular, it is known that in an indecomposable continuum, composants, meager composants and filament composants coincide. If $Y$ is an indecomposable continuum and $X$ is any composant of $Y$, then $X$ is dense and singular in $Y$. By contrast, in [Topology Appl. 210, 292--310 (2016; Zbl 1351.54015)], \textit{C. Mouron} and \textit{N. Ordoñez} constructed a decomposable continuum $Z$ with only one composant and uncountably many meager composants, each singluar dense. The main result of this paper is the following: Theorem. If $X$ is a singular dense meager composant of a continuum $Y$, then there is an indecomposable continuum $Z$ such that $X$ can be embedded in $Z$ as a composant (even though $Y$ may be decomposable). The author also shows that if $Y$ is chainable or, more generally, an inverse limit of mutually homeomorphic topological graphs, then $Y$ is necessarily indecomposable. Similar results for homogeneous continua are linked to a question of \textit{J. R. Prajs} and \textit{K. Whittington} [Indiana Univ. Math. J. 56, No. 1, 263--277 (2007; Zbl 1130.54012)]. The paper finishes with some interesting questions.