Advanced Search

We will consider unital rings A with free additive group, and want to construct (in ZFC) for each natural number k a family of ${\aleph }_k$-free A-modules G which are separable as abelian groups with special decompositions. Recall that an A-module G is ${\aleph }_k$-free if every subset of size $<{\aleph }_k$ is contained in a free submodule (we will refine this in Definition 3.2); and it is separable as an abelian group if any finite subset of G is contained in a free direct summand of G. Despite the fact that such a module G is...

An $R$-module $M$ has an almost trivial dual if there are no epimorphisms from $M$ to the free $R$-module of countable infinite rank $R^{\left(\omega \right)}$. For every natural number $k>1$, we construct arbitrarily large separable ${\aleph }_k$-free $R$-modules with almost trivial dual by means of Shelah’s Easy Black Box, which is a combinatorial principle provable in ZFC.