Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 August 2002
Ko [26] and Bruschi [11] independently showed that, insome relativized world, PSPACE (in fact, ⊕P) contains a setthat is immune to the polynomial hierarchy (PH). In this paper, westudy and settle the question of relativized separations withimmunity for PH and the counting classes PP, ${\rm C\!\!\!\!=\!\!\!P}$ , and ⊕Pin all possible pairwise combinations. Our main result is that thereis an oracle A relative to which ${\rm C\!\!\!\!=\!\!\!P}$ contains a set that is immune BPP⊕P.In particular, this ${\rm C\!\!\!\!=\!\!\!P}^A$ set is immune to PHA and to ⊕PA. Strengthening results ofTorán [48] and Green [18], we also show that, in suitable relativizations, NP contains a ${\rm C\!\!\!\!=\!\!\!P}$ -immune set, and ⊕P contains a PPPH-immune set. This implies the existence of a ${\rm C\!\!\!\!=\!\!\!P}^B$ -simple set for someoracle B, which extends results of Balcázar et al. [2,4].Our proof technique requires a circuit lower bound for “exactcounting” that is derived from Razborov's [35] circuitlower bound for majority.