Chains of Baire class 1 functions and various notions of special trees (Q2382350)

From the authors' abstract: Following Laczkovich we consider the partially ordered set \({\mathcal B}_1(\mathbb R)\) of Baire class 1 functions endowed with the pointwise order, and investigate the order types of the linearly ordered subsets. Answering a question of \textit{P. Komjáth} [Real Anal. Exch. 15, No. 2, 442--444 (1990; Zbl 0749.03036)] and \textit{K. Kunen} [Set theory. An introduction to independence proofs. Amsterdam etc.: North Holland (1980; Zbl 0443.03021)] we show (in ZFC) that special Aronszajn lines are embeddable into \({\mathcal B}_1(\mathbb R)\). We also show that under Martin's axiom a linearly ordered set \(\mathbb L\) with \(|\mathbb L|<2^\omega\) is embeddable into \({\mathcal B}_1(\mathbb R)\) iff \(\mathbb L\) does not contain a copy of \(\omega_1\) or \(\omega_1^*\). We present a ZFC example of a linear order of size \(2^\omega\) showing that this characterisation is not valid for orders of size continuum.