Paper detail

Equilateral and separated sets in some Hilbert generated Banach spaces

We study Hilbert generated versions of nonseparable Banach spaces $\mathcal X$ considered by Shelah, Steprāns and Wark where the behavior of the norm on nonseparable subsets is so irregular that it does not allow any linear bounded operator on $\mathcal X$ other than a diagonal operator (or a scalar multiple of the identity) plus a separable range operator. We address the questions if these spaces admit uncountable equilateral sets and if their unit spheres admit uncountable $(1+)$-separated or $(1+\varepsilon)$-separated sets. We resolve some of the above questions for two types of these spaces by showing both absolute and undecidability results. The corollaries are that the continuum hypothesis (in fact: the existence of a nonmeager set of reals of the first uncountable cardinality) implies the existence of an equivalent renorming of the nonsepareble Hilbert space $\ell_2(ω_1)$ which does not admit any uncountable equilateral set and it implies the existence of a nonseparable Hilbert generated Banach space containing an isomorphic copy of $\ell_2$ in each nonseparable subspace, whose unit sphere does not admit an uncountable equilateral set and does not admit an uncountable $(1+\varepsilon)$-separated set for any $\varepsilon>0$. This could be compared with a recent result by Hájek, Kania and Russo saying that all nonseparable reflexive Banach spaces admit uncountable $(1+\varepsilon)$-separated sets in their unit spheres.