Inner mantles and iterated HOD

Abstract

We present a class forcing notion $\mathbb{M}(\eta )$, uniformly definable for ordinals $\eta$, which forces the ground model to be the $\eta$-th inner mantle of the extension, in which the sequence of inner mantles has length at least $\eta$. This answers a conjecture of Fuchs, Hamkins, and Reitz [FHR15] in the positive. We also show that $\mathbb{M}(\eta )$ forces the ground model to be the $\eta$-th iterated HOD of the extension, where the sequence of iterated HODs has length at least $\eta$. We conclude by showing that the lengths of the sequences of inner mantles and of iterated HODs can be separated to be any two ordinals you please.

19 pages