Chain union closures

Abstract: We study spherical completeness of ball spaces and its stability under expansions. We give some criteria for ball spaces that guarantee that spherical completeness is preserved when the ball space is closed under unions of chains. This applies in particular to the spaces of closed ultrametric balls in ultrametric spaces with linearly ordered value sets, or more generally, with countable narrow value sets. We show that in general, chain union closures of ultrametric spaces with partially ordered value sets do not preserve spherical completeness. Further, we introduce and study the notions of chain union stability and of chain union rank, which measure how often the process of closing a ball space under all unions of chains has to be iterated until a ball space is obtained that is closed under unions of chains.