Orderability in the presence of local compactness

Dedicated to Professor Tsugunori Nogura on the occasion of his 60^th birthday

Abstract

We prove that a locally compact paracompact space is suborderable if and only if it has a continuous weak selection. This fits naturally into the pattern of the van Mill and Wattel's characterization [15] of compact orderable spaces, and provides a further partial positive answer to a question of theirs. Several applications about the orderability and suborderablity of locally compact spaces are demonstrated. In particular, we show that a locally compact paracompact space has a continuous selection for its Vietoris hyperspace of nonempty closed subsets if and only if it is a topologically well-orderable subspace of some orderable space.