Models and Sets Seminar

Title: On the universality problem for $\aleph_2$-Aronszajn and wide $\aleph_2$-Aronszajn trees
Speaker's homepage

We report on a joint work in progress with Rahman Mohammadpour in which we study the problem of the possible existence of a universal tree under weak embeddings in the classes of $\aleph_2$-Aronszajn and wide $\aleph_2$-Aronszajn trees. This problem is more complex than previously thought, in particular it seems not to be resolved under ShFA + CH using the technology of weakly Lipshitz trees. We show that under CH, for a given $\aleph_2$-Aronszajn tree $T$ without a weak ascent path, there is an $\aleph_2$-cc countably closed forcing forcing which specialises $T$ and adds an $\aleph_2$-Aronszajn tree which does not embed into $T$. One cannot however apply the ShFA to this forcing.

Further, we construct a model à la Laver-Shelah in which there are $\aleph_2$-Aronszajn trees, but none is universal. Work in progress is to obtain an analogue for universal wide $\aleph_2$-Aronszajn trees. We also comment on some negative ZFC results in the case that the embeddings are assumed to have a strong preservation property.

Title: Rigid branchwise-real tree orders
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A branchwise-real tree order is a partial order tree in which every branch is isomorphic to a real interval. In this talk, I give several methods of constructing examples of these which are rigid (i.e. without non-trivial automorphisms), subject to increasing uniformity conditions. I show that there is a rigid branchwise-real tree order in which every branching point has the same degree, one in which every point is branching and of the same degree, and finally one in which every point is branching of the same degree and which admits no monotonic function into the reals. Trees are grown iteratively in stages, and a key technique is the construction (in ZFC) of a family of colourings of $(0,\infty)$ which is 'sufficiently generic', using these colourings to determine how to proceed with the construction.

Title: The étale open topology and the stable fields conjecture
Speaker's homepage

For any field $K$, we introduce natural topologies on $K$-points of varieties over $K$, which is defined to be the weakest topology such that étale morphisms are open. This topology turns out to be natural in a lot of settings. For example, when $K$ is algebraically closed, it is easy to see that we have the Zariski topology, and the procedure picks up the valuation topology in many henselian valued fields. Moreover, many topological properties correspond to the algebraic properties of the field. As an application of this correspondence, we will show that large stable fields are separably closed. Joint work with Will Johnson, Chieu-Minh Tran, and Erik Walsberg.

Location: MALL / Zoom
Title: Some existential theories of fields
Speaker's homepageSlides

Building on previous work, I will discuss Turing reductions between various fragments of theories of fields. In particular, we exhibit several theories of fields Turing equivalent to the existential theory of the rational numbers. This is joint work with Arno Fehm.

Title: A geometric approach to some systems of exponential equations
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I will discuss three important conjectures on complex exponentiation, namely, Schanuel's conjecture, Zilber's Exponential Algebraic Closedness (EAC) conjecture and Zilber's quasiminimality conjecture, and explain how those conjectures are related to each other and to the model theory of complex exponentiation. I will mainly focus on the EAC conjecture which states that certain systems of exponential equations have complex solutions. Then I will show how it can be verified for systems of exponential equations with dominant additive projection for abelian varieties. All the necessary concepts related to abelian varieties will be defined in the talk. The analogous problem for algebraic tori (i.e. for usual complex exponentiation) was solved earlier by Brownawell and Masser. If time permits, I will show how our method can be used to give a new proof of their result. This is joint work with Jonathan Kirby and Vincenzo Mantova.

Title: When does compactness imply guessing?
Speaker's homepage

Large cardinal properties, or more generally compactness principles, usually give rise to certain guessing principles. For example, if kappa is measurable, then the diamond principle at kappa holds and if kappa is supercompact, then the Laver diamond principle holds. It is a long-standing open question whether weak compactness is consistent with the failure of diamond. In the 80's, Woodin showed it is consistent that diamond fails at a greatly Mahlo cardinal, based on the analysis on Radin forcing. It turns out that this method cannot yield significant improvement to Woodin's result. In particular, we show that in any Radin forcing extension with respect to a measure sequence on kappa, if kappa is weakly compact, then the diamond principle at kappa holds. Despite the negative result, there are still some positive results obtained by refining the analysis of Radin forcing, demonstrating that diamond can fail at a strongly inaccessible cardinal satisfying strong compactness properties. Joint work with Omer Ben-Neria.

Title: Sealing of the Universally Baire sets
Speaker's homepageSlides

A set of reals is universally Baire if all of its continuous preimages in topological spaces have the Baire property. Sealing is a type of generic absoluteness condition introduced by H. W. Woodin that asserts in strong terms that the theory of the universally Baire sets cannot be changed by set forcings. The Largest Suslin Axiom (LSA) is a determinacy axiom isolated by Woodin. It asserts that the largest Suslin cardinal is inaccessible for ordinal definable bijections. LSA-over-uB is the statement that in all (set) generic extensions there is a model of LSA whose Suslin, co-Suslin sets are the universally Baire sets.

The main result connecting these notions is: over some mild large cardinal theory, Sealing is equiconsistent with LSA-over-uB. As a consequence, we obtain that Sealing is weaker than the theory “ZFC+there is a Woodin cardinal which is a limit of Woodin cardinals”. This significantly improves upon the earlier consistency proof of Sealing by Woodin and shows that Sealing is not a strong consequence of supercompactness as suggested by Woodin's result.

We discuss some history that leads up to these results as well as the role these notions and results play in recent developments in descriptive inner model theory, an emerging field in set theory that explores deep connections between descriptive set theory, in particular, the study of canonical models of determinacy and its HOD, and inner model theory, the study of canonical inner models of large cardinals. Time permitted, we will sketch proofs of some of the results.

This talk is based on joint work with G. Sargsyan.

Title: The open dihypergraph dichotomy and the Hurewicz dichotomy for generalized Baire spaces

Generalized descriptive set theory studies analogues, associated to uncountable regular cardinals $\kappa$, of well known topological spaces such as the real line, the Cantor space and the Baire space. A canonical example is the generalized Baire space ${}^\kappa\kappa$ of functions $f:\kappa\to\kappa$ equipped with the ${<}\kappa$-support topology.

The open graph dichotomy for a given set $X$ of reals is a strengthening of the perfect set property for $X$, and it can also be viewed as the definable version of the open coloring axiom restricted to $X$. Raphaël Carroy, Benjamin Miller and Dániel Soukup have recently introduced an $\aleph_0$-dimensional generalization of the open graph dichotomy which implies several well-known dichotomy theorems for Polish spaces.

We show that in Solovay's model, this $\aleph_0$-dimensional open dihypergraph dichotomy holds for all sets of reals. In our main theorem, we obtain a version of this previous result for generalized Baire spaces ${}^\kappa\kappa$ for uncountable regular cardinals $\kappa$. As an application, we derive several versions of the Hurewicz dichotomy for definable subsets of ${}^\kappa\kappa$. This is joint work with Philipp Schlicht.

Title: Hyperlogarithmic contraction groups

Contraction groups are a model theoretic structure introduced by F.V Kuhlmann to help generalise the global behaviour of the logarithmic function on a non-archimedean field. They consist of an ordered abelian group augmented with a map called the contraction which collapses entire archimedean classes to a single point. Kuhlmann proved in his paper that the theory of a particular type of contraction group had quantifier elimination and was weakly o-minimal (so every definable set is the finite union of convex sets and points).

We can go further and ask how a hyperlogarithmic function behaves globally on a non-archimedean field. A hyper logarithm is the inverse of a trans exponential, which is any function that grows faster than all powers of $\exp$. From an appropriate field equipped with a hyperlogarithm, we get a new type of structure with two contraction maps, which we will call 'Hyperlogarithmic contraction groups'. In this talk I will show how the proof for Q.E and weak o-minimality given by Kuhlmann can be adapted to show that Hyperlogrithmic contraction groups also have these properties.

Title: Ramsey theory on infinite structures
Speaker's homepageCorrected paper

The Infinite Ramsey Theorem says that for any positive integer $n$, given a coloring of all $n$-element subsets of the natural numbers into finitely many colors, there is an infinite set $M$ of natural numbers such that all $n$-element subsets of $M$ have the same color. Infinite Structural Ramsey Theory is concerned with finding analogues of the Infinite Ramsey Theorem for Fraïssé limits, and also more generally for universal structures. In most cases, the exact analogue of Ramsey's Theorem fails. However, sometimes one can find bounds of the following sort: Given a finite substructure $A$ of an infinite structure $S$, we let $T(A,S)$ denote the least number, if it exists, such that for any coloring of the copies of $A$ in $S$ into finitely many colors, there is a substructure $S'$ of $S$, isomorphic to $S$, such that the copies of $A$ in $S'$ take no more than $T(A,S)$ colors. If for each finite substructure $A$ of $S$, this number $T(A,S)$ exists, then we say that $S$ hasfinite big Ramsey degrees.

In the past six years, there has been a resurgence of investigations into the existence and characterization of big Ramsey degrees for infinite structures, leading to many new and exciting results and methods. We will present an overview of the area and some highlights of recent work by various author combinations from among Balko, Barbosa, Chodounsky, Coulson, Dobrinen, Hubicka, Konjecny, Masulovic, Nesetril, Patel, Vena, and Zucker.