On the defect of compactness in Banach spaces (Q889480)

A well-known theorem for Hilbert spaces says that every bounded sequence has a weakly convergent subsequence. However, in the general Banach space setting, this result is no longer always true. In order to have some sort of convergence for bounded sequences in an arbitrary Banach space, several concentration compactness methods have been introduced in the literature. The authors of this paper introduce a new mode of convergence, polar convergence, which they show will coincide with the weak convergence iff the norm satisfies the Opial condition. This polar convergence allows the authors to prove a general profile decomposition method for uniformly convex and uniformly smooth Banach spaces.