Diamond on ladder systems and countably metacompact topological spaces

Abstract: The property of countable metacompactness of a topological space gets its importance from Dowker's 1951 theorem that the product of a normal space X with the unit interval is again normal iff X is countably metacompact. In a paper, Leiderman and Szeptycki studied $\Delta$-spaces, which are a subclass of the class of countably metacompact spaces. They proved that a single Cohen real introduces a ladder system $L$ over the first uncountable cardinal for which the corresponding space $X_L$ is not a $\Delta$-space, and asked whether there is a ZFC example of a ladder system $L$ over some cardinal $\kappa$ for which $X_L$ is not countably metacompact, in particular, not a $\Delta$-space. We prove that an affirmative answer holds for the cardinal $\kappa=cf(\beth_{\omega+1})$. Assuming $\beth_\omega=\aleph_\omega$, we get an example at a much lower cardinal, namely $\kappa=2<sup>{2<sup>{2<sup>{\aleph_0}}}$, and our ladder system $L$ is moreover $\omega$-bounded.