Almost o-minimal structures and $\mathfrak X$-structures

Abstract

We propose new structures called almost o-minimal structures and $\mathfrak X$-structures. The former is a first-order expansion of a dense linear order without endpoints such that the intersection of a definable set with a bounded open interval is a finite union of points and open intervals. The latter is a variant of van den Dries and Miller's analytic geometric categories and Shiota's $\mathfrak X$-sets and $\mathfrak Y$-sets. In them, the family of definable sets are closed only under proper projections unlike first-order structures. We demonstrate that an $\mathfrak X$-expansion of an ordered divisible abelian group always contains an o-minimal expansion of an ordered group such that all bounded $\mathfrak X$-definable sets are definable in the structure. Another contribution of this paper is a uniform local definable cell decomposition theorem for almost o-minimal expansions of ordered groups $\mathcal M=(M,<,0,+,\ldots)$. Let $\{A_\lambda\}_{\lambda\in\Lambda}$ be a finite family of definable subsets of $M^{m+n}$. Take an arbitrary positive element $R \in M$ and set $B=]-R,R[^n$. Then, there exists a finite partition into definable sets \begin{equation*} M^m \times B = X_1 \cup \ldots \cup X_k \end{equation*} such that $B=(X_1)_b \cup \ldots \cup (X_k)_b$ is a definable cell decomposition of $B$ for any $b \in M^m$ and either $X_i \cap A_\lambda = \emptyset$ or $X_i \subseteq A_\lambda$ for any $1 \leq i \leq k$ and $\lambda \in \Lambda$. Here, the notation $S_b$ denotes the fiber of a definable subset $S$ of $M^{m+n}$ at $b \in M^m$. We introduce the notion of multi-cells and demonstrate that any definable set is a finite union of multi-cells in the course of the proof of the above theorem.