Jumps of computably enumerable equivalence relations

We study computably enumerable equivalence relations (or, ceers), under computable reducibility ≤, and the halting jump operation on ceers. We show that every jump is uniform join-irreducible, and thus join-irreducible. Therefore, the uniform join of two incomparable ceers is not equivalent to any jump. On the other hand there exist ceers that are not equivalent to jumps, but are uniform join-irreducible: in fact above any non-universal ceer there is a ceer which is not equivalent to a jump, and is uniform join-irreducible. We also study transfinite iterations of the jump operation. If a is an ordinal notation, and E is a ceer, then let $E^{(a)}$ denote the ceer obtained by transfinitely iterating the jump on E along the path of ordinal notations up to a. In contrast with what happens for the Turing jump and Turing reducibility, where if a set X is an upper bound for the A-arithmetical sets then $X^{(2)}$ computes $A^{(\omega )}$, we show that there is a ceer R such that $R\ge {\mathrm{Id}}^{(n)}$, for every finite ordinal n, but, for all k, $R^{(k)}?{\mathrm{Id}}^{(\omega )}$ (here Id is the identity equivalence relation). We show that if $a,b$ are notations of the same ordinal less than ${\omega }^2$, then $E^{(a)}\equiv E^{(b)}$, but there are notations $a,b$ of ${\omega }^2$ such that ${\mathrm{Id}}^{(a)}$ and ${\mathrm{Id}}^{(b)}$ are incomparable. Moreover, there is no non-universal ceer which is an upper bound for all the ceers of the form ${\mathrm{Id}}^{(a)}$ where a is a notation for ${\omega }^2$.