On Weak Compactness and Uniform Regularity in Lipschitz free Spaces

Abstract: We analyze the properties of weakly compact sets in Lipschitz free spaces. Prior research has established that, for a complete metric space $M$, weakly precompact sets in the Lipschitz free space $\mathcal F(M)$ are tight. In this paper, we prove that these sets actually exhibit a stronger property, which we call uniform regularity. However, this condition alone is not sufficient to characterize weakly compact sets, except in the case of scattered metric spaces. On the other hand, if $T$ is an $\mathbb R$-tree, we leverage Godard's isometry between $\mathcal F(T)$ and $L^1(λ_T)$ to obtain an intrinsic characterization of weakly compact sets in $\mathcal F(T)$. This approach allows us to identify conditions that may describe weak compactness across a wider range of spaces. In particular, we provide a characterization of norm-compactness in terms of sums of "large molecules'', while we show that sums of "small molecules'' contain an $\ell_1$-basis.