Examples of non-Archimedean Fréchet spaces without nuclear Köthe quotients (Q924193)

The author continues his study of quotients of non-Archimedean Fréchet spaces carried out in some of his previous works. The most important results on the subject proved in those works can be summarized as follows. Let \(E\) be a non-normable Fréchet space of countable type over a complete non-Archimedean and non-trivially valued field \(K\). Then we have the following. (i) \(E\) has a normable Köthe quotient if and only if \(E\) is not nuclear (by a Köthe space we mean an infinite-dimensional Fréchet space with a Schauder base and with a continuous norm). (ii) \(E\) has a quotient isomorphic to \(K^{\mathbb{N}}\) (observe that \(K^{\mathbb{N}}\) is an infinite-dimensional Fréchet space with a Schauder base, but it is not a Köthe space). (iii) \(E\) has a non-normable quotient with a continuous norm if and only if \(E\) is not isomorphic to a countable product of Banach spaces. These results lead to the natural question whether any non-normable Fréchet space of countable type with a continuous norm \(F\) over \(K\) has a non-normable Köthe quotient, which is equivalent to ask whether any such \(F\) has a nuclear Köthe quotient. In the present paper, the author shows that, when \(K\) is spherically complete, the question has a negative answer. But the situation for non-spherically complete base fields \(K\) is unknown. The key point to get his results is the first theorem given in the paper, which states that, if \(K\) is spherically complete, then the dual \(\ell^{\infty}\) of \(c_0\) has a closed subspace \(W\) that is (a) total (i.e., if \(x \in c_0\) is such that \(f(x) =0\) for all \(f \in W\), then \(x=0\)), (b) strongly non-norming (i.e., \(W^n \varsubsetneq \ell^{\infty}\) for all \(n \in \mathbb{N}\), where \(W^n\) is inductively defined by \(W^{0} = W\), \(W^n =\) the set of all elements \(f \in \ell^{\infty}\) for which there exists a norm bounded net \((f_{\alpha})\) in \(W^{n-1}\) which converges pointwise to \(f\)). Using this subspace \(W\) of \(\ell^{\infty}\) and some rather complicated techniques, the author finally constructs the desired space \(F\) that provides the negative answer to the above question.