A characterization of jump operators

Abstract

The topic of this paper is jump operators, a subject which originated with some questions of Martin and a partial answer to them obtained by Steel [18]. The topic of jump operators is a part of the general study of the structure of the Turing degrees, but it is concerned with an aspect of that structure which is different from the usual concerns of classical recursion theory. Specifically, it is concerned with studying functions on the degrees, such as the Turing jump operator, the hyperjump operator, and the sharp operator.Roughly speaking, a jump operator is a definable ≤T-increasing function on the Turing degrees. The purpose of this paper is to characterize the jump operators, in terms of concepts from descriptive set theory. Again roughly speaking, the main theorem states that all jump operators (other than the identity function) are obtained from pointclasses by the same process by which the hyperjump operator is obtained from the pointclass Π11; that is, if Γ is the pointclass, then the operator maps the real x to the universal Γ(x) subset of ω. This characterization theorem has some corollaries, one of which answers a question of Steel [18]. In §1 we give a brief introduction to this general topic, followed by a brief (and still somewhat imprecise) description of the results contained in this paper.