Se introducen los ideales de operadores que admiten extensión o levantamiento y se presenta una nueva aproximación al estudio de la escisión de sucesiones exactas cortas de espacios de Banach. Se considera la maximalidad de estos ideales y se investiga si son cerrados respecto de los límites puntuales acotados. Se resumen algunos ejemplos y se clarifica el papel de los espacios L1 y L∞.

We show that a Banach space $E$ has the weakly compact approximation property if and only if each continuous Banach-valued polynomial on $E$ can be uniformly approximated on compact sets by homogeneous polynomials which are members of the ideal of homogeneous polynomials generated by weakly compact linear operators. An analogous result is established also for the compact approximation property.

Certain operator ideals are used to study interpolation of operators between spaces generated by the real method. Using orbital equivalence a new reiteration formula is proved for certain real interpolation spaces generated by ordered pairs of Banach lattices of the form $(X,L_{\infty }\left(w\right))$. As an application we extend Ovchinnikov’s interpolation theorem from the context of classical Lions-Peetre spaces to a larger class of real interpolation spaces. A description of certain abstract J-method spaces is also presented....