Unconditional structure of Banach spaces with few operators

Abstract

This article was initially motivated by our goal to show that the Banach space $\mathbb{G}$ constructed by Gowers in [W. T. Gowers, A solution to Banach's hyperplane problem, Bull. London Math. Soc. 26 (1994), no. 6, 523-530] to settle Banach's hyperplane problem has a unique unconditional basis. This uniqueness result served as a springboard to ask whether further structural insights could be derived by rigging Gowers' original construction. As it turned out, the $p$-convexification of $\mathbb{G}$ for $1< p<\infty$, $p\not=2$, provides a family of Banach spaces, each of them with a unique unconditional basis containing block bases whose spreading models are not equivalent to the unit vector basis of $\ell_1$, $\ell_2$, or $c_0$. This solves in the negative a forty-year-old open problem raised by Bourgain et al. in their 1985 \textit{Memoir}, [J. Bourgain, P. G. Casazza, J. Lindenstrauss, and L. Tzafriri, Banach spaces with a unique unconditional basis, up to permutation, Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 54 (1985), no. 322, iv+111] where they studied the uniqueness of unconditional structure in infinite direct sums of those three spaces with the aim to classify all Banach spaces with a unique unconditional basis. As a by-product of our work, we also disprove the conjecture in structure theory that a space having a unique unconditional basis must be isomorphic to its square, and evince that when a Banach space $\mathbb{X}$ with an unconditional basis has few operators, then the space itself and all its complemented subspaces have a unique unconditional structure.