Cummings, Foreman, and Magidor proved that Jensen’s square principle is non-compact at $\aleph _\omega $, meaning that it is consistent that $\square _{\aleph _n}$ holds for all $n<\omega $ while $\square _{\aleph _\omega }$ fails. We investigate the natural question of whether this phenomenon generalizes to singulars of uncountable cofinality. Surprisingly, we show that under some mild ${{\mathsf {PCF}}}$-theoretic hypotheses, the weak square principle $\square _\kappa ^*$ is in fact compact at singulars of uncountable cofinality.

We investigate pseudopowers of singular cardinals and deduce some consequences for covering numbers at singular cardinals of uncountable cofinality.

Let $\kappa $ be a regular uncountable cardinal, and a cardinal greater than or equal to $\kappa $ . Revisiting a celebrated result of Shelah, we show that if is close to $\kappa $ and (= the least size of a cofinal subset of ) is greater than , then can be represented (in the sense of pcf theory) as a pseudopower. This can be used to obtain optimal results concerning the splitting problem. For example we show that if and , then no $\kappa $ -complete ideal on is weakly -saturated.

We show that it is relatively consistent with ZFC to have PCF structures of height δ, for all ordinals δ < ω3.

We prove that a combinatorial consequence of the negation of the PCF conjecture for intervais, involving free subsets relative to set mappings, is not implied by even the strongest known large cardinal axiom.