Complexity of weakly null sequences

Abstract

We introduce an ordinal index which measures the complexity of a weakly null sequence, and show that a construction due to J. Schreier can be iterated to produce for each alpha < omega_1, a weakly null sequence (x^{alpha}_n)_n in C(omega^{omega^{alpha}})) with complexity alpha. As in the Schreier example each of these is a sequence of indicator functions which is a suppression-1 unconditional basic sequence. These sequences are used to construct Tsirelson-like spaces of large index. We also show that this new ordinal index is related to the Lavrentiev index of a Baire-1 function and use the index to sharpen some results of Alspach and Odell on averaging weakly null sequences.