Indivisible Sequences and Descendability

Abstract

We introduce the notion of indivisible sequences and show that to any indivisible sequence $\{S, \Psi: S \to R\}$ we can associate faithfully flat ring maps $R \to R'$ that are not descendable. As a corollary, we obtain the first example of a faithfully flat ring map between $\aleph_{n-1}$-countable rings that has descendability exponent $n$, and indeed a faithfully flat ring map between $\aleph_{\omega}$-countable rings that is not descendable.