Huge Reflection

Abstract

We study Structural Reflection beyond Vopěnka's Principle, at the level of almosthuge cardinals and higher, up to rank-into-rank embeddings. We identify and classify new large cardinal notions in that region that correspond to some form of what we call Exact Structural Reflection (ESR). Namely, given cardinals $\kappa<\lambda$ and a class $\mathcal{C}$ of structures of the same type, the corresponding instance of ESR asserts that for every structure $A$ in $\mathcal{C}$ of rank $\lambda$, there is a structure $B$ in $\mathcal{C}$ of rank $\kappa$ and an elementary embedding of $B$ into $A$. Inspired by the statement of Chang's Conjecture, we also introduce and study sequential forms of ESR, which, in the case of sequences of length $\omega$, turn out to be very strong. Indeed, when restricted to $\Pi_1$-definable classes of structures they follow from the existence of $I 1$-embeddings, while for more complicated classes of structures, e.g., $\Sigma_2$, they are not known to be consistent. Thus, these principles unveil a new class of large cardinals that go beyond I1-embeddings, yet they may not fall into Kunen's Inconsistency.