Level Two of the Quantifier Alternation Hierarchy over Infinite Words

Abstract

The study of various decision problems for logic fragments has a long history in computer science. This paper is on the membership problem for a fragment of first-order logic over infinite words; the membership problem asks for a given language whether it is definable in some fixed fragment. The alphabetic topology was introduced as part of an effective characterization of the fragment $\Sigma_2$ over infinite words. Here, $\Sigma_2$ consists of the first-order formulas with two blocks of quantifiers, starting with an existential quantifier. Its Boolean closure is $\mathbb{B}\Sigma_2$. Our first main result is an effective characterization of the Boolean closure of the alphabetic topology, that is, given an $\omega$-regular language $L$, it is decidable whether $L$ is a Boolean combination of open sets in the alphabetic topology. This is then used for transferring Place and Zeitoun's recent decidability result for $\mathbb{B}\Sigma_2$ from finite to infinite words.