A lattice approach to narrow operators

It is known that if a rearrangement invariant function space E on [0,1] has an unconditional basis then each linear continuous operator on E is a sum of two narrow operators. On the other hand, the sum of two narrow operators in L₁ is narrow. To find a general approach to these results, we extend the notion of a narrow operator to the case when the domain space is a vector lattice. Our main result asserts that the set N_r(E, F) of all narrow regular operators is a band in the vector lattice L_r(E, F) of all regular operators from a non-atomic order continuous Banach lattice E to an order continuous Banach lattice F. The band generated by the disjointness preserving operators is the orthogonal complement to N_r(E, F) in L_r(E, F). As a consequence we obtain the following generalization of the Kalton-Rosenthal theorem: every regular operator T : E → F from a non-atomic Banach lattice E to an order continuous Banach lattice F has a unique representation as T = T_D + T_N where T_D is a sum of an order absolutely summable family of disjointness preserving operators and T_N is narrow. Supported by Ukr. Derzh. Tema N 0103Y001103.