The geometry of Hrushovski constructions. I: The uncollapsed case (Q639656)

Using a new amalgamation construction, \textit{E. Hrushovski} built in [Ann. Pure Appl. Logic 62, No. 2, 147--166 (1993; Zbl 0804.03020)] strongly minimal sets with exotic geometries, thus refuting Zilber's trichotomy conjecture. He constructs continuum many pairwise non-isomorphic strongly minimal sets, and he asks if the pregeometries induced by algebraic closure on these sets were all locally isomorphic. The paper under review addresses Hrushovski's question from [loc.\ cit.] for the uncollapsed versions of the construction, where the corresponding structure is \(\omega\)-stable of Morley rank \(\omega\). The setting is the following: for \(n\) a natural number, consider the language \({\mathcal L}_n\) with just one \(n\)-ary predicate \(R_n\) and perform Hrushovski's amalgamation construction on the class of finite \({\mathcal L}_n\)-structures \(A=(A,R_n^{A})\), with respect to the predimension function \(\delta(A):=|A|-|R_n^{A}|\). Denote by \({\mathcal M}_n\) the corresponding generic model, and by \(PG({\mathcal M}_n)\) the pregeometry on \({\mathcal M}_n\). The main results of the paper are as follows. The finite subgeometries of \(PG({\mathcal M}_n)\) and \(PG({\mathcal M}_m)\) are the same for all \(m,n\geq 3\). (This is false for the finite subpregeometries.) For \(m\neq n\), \(PG({\mathcal M}_n)\) and \(PG({\mathcal M}_m)\) are not isomorphic as pregeometries. The authors even show a stronger result, namely that these two pregeometries are not even locally isomorphic (i.e.\ after some localisation at finite subsets). This strengthening is obtained by showing that every localisation of \(PG({\mathcal M}_n)\) is isomorphic to \(PG({\mathcal M}_n)\), as pregeometries. The paper starts with some quick review of Hrushovski's amalgamation method, then studies embeddings between pregeometries coming from generic models with respect to various languages (even infinite) and predimension functions. The principal technical tools consist in a series of so-called exchange lemmas, where it is shown that under certain conditions, a change of structure on a self-sufficient subset \(A\) of a structure \({\mathcal M}\) does not affect self-sufficiency (or \(PG({\mathcal M})\) etc.). The main results mentioned above are then proved using adequate exchange procedures. The paper finishes with a chapter on amalgamation of pregeometries. It is shown that, for every \(n\), there is a class of pregeometries \(P_n\) and corresponding embeddings \(\vartriangleleft_n\) such that \(PG({\mathcal M}_n)\) is a generic model for the amalgamation class \((P_n,\vartriangleleft_n)\).