Motivated by the Ax–Kochen/Ershov principle, a large number of questions about Henselian valued fields have been shown to reduce to analogous questions about the value group and residue field. In this article, we investigate the burden of Henselian valued fields in the three-sorted Denef–Pas language. If T is a theory of Henselian valued fields admitting relative quantifier elimination (in any characteristic), we show that the burden of T is equal to the sum of the burdens of its value group and (...) residue field. As a consequence, T is NTP2 if and only if its residue field and value group are; the same is true for the statements “T is strong” and “T has finite burden.”. (shrink)

The following conjecture is due to Shelah–Hasson: Any infinite strongly NIP field is either real closed, algebraically closed, or admits a non‐trivial definable henselian valuation, in the language of rings. We specialise this conjecture to ordered fields in the language of ordered rings, which leads towards a systematic study of the class of strongly NIP almost real closed fields. As a result, we obtain a complete characterisation of this class.