Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2014
In the early eighties, answering a question of A. Macintyre, J. H. Schmerl ([13]) proved that every countable recursively saturated structure, equipped with a function β encoding the finite functions, is the β-closure of an infinite indiscernible sequence. This result implies that every countably saturated structure, in a countable but not necessarily recursive language, is an Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model, by which we mean that the structure expands, in a countable language, to the Skolem hull of an infinite indiscernible sequence (in the new language).
More recently, D. Lascar ([5]) showed that the saturated model of cardinality ℵ1 of an ω-stable theory is also an Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model.
These results naturally raise the following problem: which (countable) complete theories have an uncountably saturated Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model. We study a generalization of this question. Namely, we call ACI-model a structure which can be expanded, in a countable language L′, to the algebraic closure (in L′) of an infinite indiscernible sequence (in L′). And we try to characterize the λ-saturated structures which are ACI-models.
The main results are the following. First it is enough to restrict ourselves to ℵ1-saturated structures: if T has an ℵ1-saturated ACI-model then, for every infinite λ, T has a λ-saturated ACI-model. We obtain a complete answer in the case of stable theories: if T is stable then the three following properties are equivalent: (a) T is ω-stable, (b) T has an ℵ1-saturated ACI-model, (c) every saturated model of T is an Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model. The unstable case is more complicated, however we show that if T has an ℵ1-saturated ACI-model then T doesn't have the independence property.