STRUCTURE TOPOLOGY AND EXTREME OPERATORS

We say that a Banach space $X$ is ‘nice’ if every extreme operator from any Banach space into $X$ is a nice operator (that is, its adjoint preserves extreme points). We prove that if $X$ is a nice almost $CL$-space, then $X$ is isometrically isomorphic to $c_{0}(I)$ for some set $I$. We also show that if $X$ is a nice Banach space whose closed unit ball has the Krein–Milman property, then $X$ is $l_{\infty }^{n}$ for some $n\in \mathbb{N}$. The proof of our results relies on the structure topology.

Extreme Point Methods and Banach-Stone Theorems

An operator is said to be nice if its conjugate maps extreme points of the dual unit ball to extreme points. The classical Banach-Stone Theorem says that an isometry from a space of continuous functions on a compact Hausdorff space onto another such space is a weighted composition operator. One common proof of this result uses the fact that an isometry is a nice operator. We use extreme point methods and the notion of centralizer to characterize nice operators as operator weighted compositions on subspaces of spaces of continuous functions with values in a Banach space. Previous characterizations of isometries from a subspace M of C0( Q, X) into C0(K, Y) require Y to be strictly convex, but we are able to obtain some results without that assumption. Important use is made of a vector-valued version of the Choquet Boundary. We also characterize nice operators from one function module to another.