Operators on injective tensor products of separable Banach spaces and spaces with few operators

Abstract: We give a characterization of the operators on the injective tensor product $E \hat{\otimes}\varepsilon X$ for $E$ a separable Banach space and $X$ a (non-separable) Banach space with few operators, in the sense that any operator $T: X \to X$ takes the form $T = \lambda I + S$ for a scalar $\lambda \in \mathbb{K}$ and an operator $S$ with separable range. This is used to give a classification of the complemented subspaces and closed operator ideals of spaces of the form $C_0(\omega \times K\mathcal{A})$, where $K_\mathcal{A}$ is a locally compact Hausdorff space induced by an almost disjoint family $\mathcal{A}$ such that $C_0(K_\mathcal{A})$ has few operators.