Compatible algebraic structures on scattered compacta (Q818391)

A subtitle of the present paper might be ``Does every scattered compact space admit a continuous semilattice operation?'' The question was posed in an earlier paper by \textit{O. V. Gutik} and \textit{M. Rajagopalan} and \textit{K. Sundaresan} [J. Aust. Math. Soc. 72, No. 3, 349--362 (2002; Zbl 1024.22001)]. In the paper under review it is shown that the answer is NO. Denote by \(\psi_{\mathcal F}(\mathbb{N})\) the one-point compactification of the well-known locally compact space \(\mathbb{N}\cup{\mathcal F}\) (\(\mathbb{N}\) is a countable discrete space, \({\mathcal F}\) is a maximal almost disjoint (MAD) family of infinite subsets of \(\mathbb{N}\), the points of \(\mathbb{N}\) are isolated and, for \(A\in{\mathcal F}\), the sets \(\{A\}\cup A\setminus K\), \(K\) is finite, form a base at \(\{A\}\)). Note that \(\mathbb{N}\) is not sequentially dense in \(\psi_{\mathcal F}(\mathbb{N})\). Theorem 3. For any infinite MAD family \({\mathcal F}\) on \(\mathbb{N}\) the space \(\psi_{\mathcal F}(\mathbb{N})\) is a scattered compact space with scattered height 2 admitting no separately continuous semilattice operation. On the other hand, besides other nice results, the following has been proved: Theorem 4. If a separable compact scattered space \(X\) of scattered height 2 admits a separately continuous semilattice operation, then the set of all isolated points of \(X\) is sequentially dense in \(X\). At the end, six related problems are posed.