Properties of lush spaces and applications to Banach spaces with numerical index 1

Abstract

The concept of lushness was introduced recently as a Banach space property, which ensures that the space has numerical index 1. We prove that for Asplund spaces lushness is actually equivalent to numerical index 1. We prove that every separable Banach space containing an isomorphic copy of c0 can be renormed equivalently to be lush, and thus to have numerical index 1. The rest of the paper is devoted to the study of lushness just as a property of Banach spaces. We prove that lushness is separably determined, is stable under ultraproducts, and we characterize those spaces of the form X = (R, ‖ · ‖) with absolute norm such that X-sum preserves lushness of summands, showing that this property is equivalent to lushness of X.