On one-point connectifications (Q861956)

In this paper, a (separable metric) space is connectible if it has a one-point connectification, that is to say, there is a connected space \(Y\) containing (a homeomorphic copy of) \(X\) and such that \(Y\setminus X\) is a singleton. A space is totally disconnected if the quasicomponents are singletons and is almost zero-dimensional if every point has a local neighbourhood base consisting of sets which are intersections of clopen sets. A space is cohesive if it has an open cover, no element of which contains a non-empty clopen subset of the space and is strongly cohesive if it possesses an open cover \(\mathcal U\) such that for every clopen set \(C\subseteq X\) and every \(U\in \mathcal U\), \(C\setminus U\) is not compact. In an as yet unpublished manuscript, two of the authors (Dijkstra and van Mill) have shown that every connectible space is cohesive and that for almost zero-dimensional spaces the two concepts coincide. The paper under review continues the study of the relationship between connectible and cohesive spaces. It is shown that connectible spaces are strongly cohesive and examples are given of a totally disconnected cohesive space which is not connectible and a cohesive space which is not strongly cohesive and which does not contain any compact clopen set. Cohesive subsets of the real line are characterized as those subsets which are locally connected and dense-in-themselves and it is shown that among locally compact spaces the properties of being strongly cohesive and connectible are both equivalent to having no compact component. In Section 4, the authors study ``Erdős-type'' subspaces of some fixed \(\ell^{p}\) and show that the canonical one-point connectification of the Erdős space has the fixed point property, thus proving a claim made by \textit{J. Cobb} and \textit{W. Voxman} [Am. Math. Monthly 87, 278--282 (1980; Zbl 0434.54038)] but recently (2005) withdrawn.