The Ball-Covering Property in Lipschitz-Free Spaces

Abstract

We study ball-covering properties in Lipschitz-free spaces. We establish an extension criterion for proving that $\mathcal F(M)$ fails the ball-covering property and apply it to several classes of nonseparable metric spaces. In contrast, we construct a nonseparable uniformly discrete metric space $M$ such that $\mathcal F(M)$ has the uniform ball-covering property and is isomorphic to $\ell_1(2^\omega)$. More precisely, $\mathcal F(M)$ has the $\alpha$-ball-covering property for every $\alpha\in[-1,1)$. This example also shows that these quantitative ball-covering properties are not hereditary within the class of Lipschitz-free spaces. Finally, we prove some stability results under sufficiently small bi-Lipschitz perturbations of the metric.