We show that Gitik’s short extender gap-2 forcing is of Prikry type.

Let$\kappa $be a regular uncountable cardinal, anda cardinal greater than or equal to$\kappa $. Revisiting a celebrated result of Shelah, we show that ifis close to$\kappa $and(= the least size of a cofinal subset of) is greater than, thencan be represented (in the sense of pcf theory) as a pseudopower. This can be used to obtain optimal results concerning the splitting problem. For example we show that ifand, then no$\kappa $-complete ideal onis weakly-saturated.

The purpose of the present paper is to present new methods of blowing up the power of a singular cardinal κ of cofinality ω. New PCF configurations are obtained. The techniques developed here will be used in a subsequent paper to construct a model with a countable set which pcf has cardinality ℵ1.