On the pointwise Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás property for operators

We study approximation of operators between Banach spaces X and Y that nearly attain their norms in a given point by operators that attain their norms at the same point. When such approximations exist, we say that the pair (X, Y) has the pointwise Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás property (pointwise BPB property for short). In this paper we mostly concentrate on those X, called universal pointwise BPB domain spaces, such that (X, Y) possesses pointwise BPB property for every Y, and on those Y, called universal pointwise BPB range spaces, such that (X, Y) enjoys pointwise BPB property for every uniformly smooth X. We show that every universal pointwise BPB domain space is uniformly convex and that Lp(µ) spaces fail to have this property when p > 2. No universal pointwise BPB range space can be simultaneously uniformly convex and uniformly smooth unless its dimension is one. We also discuss a version of the pointwise BPB property for compact operators.