Skip to main content
4 of 4
I originally said that asking about remainders of locally compact spaces becomes much less interesting. This was pointed out as not necessarily correct by Todd Trimble, so I reworded it to say that the question was "more tractable".

Remainders in compactifications of completely metrizable spaces

Given a Tychonoff (topological) space $X$, we know that $X$ admits a Hausdorff compactification $cX$. We say the remainder of $X$ in this compactification is $rX=cX\setminus X$. One natural question, which I believe is due to Arhangle'skii, is the following.

Given such a space $X$, what can we say about its remainder in a Hausdorff compactification?

I will assume all compactifications are Hausdorff from now on. I recently attended a talk of Arhangle'skii's, in which he asked a more more focussed version of the above questions.

Can we give necessary and sufficient conditions for a topological space to be the remainder of a compactification of a metric space?

For example, a theorem due Henriksen and Isbell gives us that, given a metrizable space $X$, any remainder $rX$ must be Lindelöf and hence paracompact. If we restrict ourselves further to locally compact spaces, we see that such spaces are open in their compactifications, and hence their remainders are compact. So in this case, the question becomes more tractable.

This leads us to another natural restriction, to completely metrizable spaces. We know that a metric space $X$ is completely metrizable if and only if it is Cech-complete, if and only if it is $G_\delta$ in all of its compactifications. So, their remainders are (completely regular) $F_\sigma$ subsets of compact spaces, which are going to be $\sigma$-compact. I was curious if more was known about this specific class of spaces. That is, my question is as follows:

Given a completely metrizable space $X$, what can we say about the remainders $rX$ of $X$?