Trees and -subsets of ω1ω1

Abstract

AbstractWe study descriptive set theory in the space by letting trees with no uncountable branches play a similar role as countable ordinals in traditional descriptive set theory. By using such trees, we get, for example, a covering property for the class of -sets of .We call a family of trees universal for a class of trees if ⊆ and every tree in can be order-preservingly mapped into a tree in . It is well known that the class of countable trees with no infinite branches has a universal family of size ℵ1. We shall study the smallest cardinality of a universal family for the class of trees of cardinality ≤ ℵ1 with no uncountable branches. We prove that this cardinality can be 1 (under ¬CH) and any regular cardinal κ which satisfies (under CH). This bears immediately on the covering property of the -subsets of the space .We also study the possible cardinalities of definable subsets of . We show that the statement that every definable subset of has cardinality <ωn or cardinality is equiconsistent with ZFC (if n ≥ 3) and with ZFC plus an inaccessible (if n = 2).Finally, we define an analogue of the notion of a Borel set for the space and prove a Souslin-Kleene type theorem for this notion.