On the Crawford number attaining operators (Q6052377)

The Crawford number \(c(T)\) of the bounded linear operator \(T\) defined on \(X\) is defined to be the following infimum \[ c(T) := \inf \Big\{ |x^*(T(x))|: (x, x^*) \in \Pi(X) \Big\} \] where \(\Pi(X):= \{ (x, x^*) \in S_{X} \times S_{X^*}: x^*(x) = 1\}\). In the present paper, the authors study the subset \(\mbox{CNA}(X)\) of all bounded linear operators which attain their Crawford number. Among other results, they prove that every operator attains its Crawford number when \(X\) is finite-dimensional; they show that \(c(T) = c(T^*)\) for every operator \(T \in \mathcal{L}(X)\) and give a characterization of when \(T^*\) belongs to \(\mbox{CNA}(X^*)\). They also study the density of Crawford number attaining operators. Indeed, after proving that there exists an injective operator \(T\) with \(c(T) = 0\) which never attains its Crawford number, they start studying conditions on the involved Banach spaces \(X\) to get such a denseness. For instance, whenever \(c(T) = 0\), the operator \(T\) can be approximated by Crawford number attaining operators; for every Banach space \(X\), the subset of all Crawford number attaining compact operators is always dense in \(\mathcal{K}(X)\); moreover, when \(X\) has the RNP, the subset \(\mbox{CNA}(X)\) is always dense in \(\mathcal{L}(X)\) for every Banach space \(X\). They conclude the paper with Bollobás type theorems for Crawford numbers and several interesting questions about the topic.