View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Elsevier - Publisher Connector Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 197 (2005) 83–139 www.elsevier.com/locate/jpaa Liouville closed H -fields Matthias Aschenbrennera,∗,1, Lou van den Driesb,2 aDepartment of Mathematics, University of California at Berkeley, Evans Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA bDepartment of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1409 W. Green St., Urbana, IL 61801, USA Received 31 January 2003; received in revised form 22 June 2004 Communicated by M.-F. Roy Abstract H -fields are fields with an ordering and a derivation subject to some compatibilities. (Hardy fields extending R and fields of transseries over R are H-fields.) We prove basic facts about the location of zeros of differential polynomials in Liouville closed H-fields, and study various constructions in the category of H-fields: closure under powers, constant field extension, completion, and building H-fields with prescribed constant field and H-couple. We indicate difficulties in obtaining a good model theory of H-fields, including an undecidability result. We finish with open questions that motivate our work. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. MSC: 12H05; 12J15 0. Introduction In [2] we introduced H-fields as an abstraction of Hardy fields [7,26], and as a step towards a model-theoreticunderstanding of the differential field R((t))LE of logarithmic- exponential series [12]. Here we develop the subject of H-fields further. Recall from [2] ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses:
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