Chains of baire class 1 functions and various notions of special trees

Following Laczkovich we consider the partially ordered setB ₁(ℝ) of Baire class 1 functions endowed with the pointwise order, and investigate the order types of the linearly ordered subsets. Answering a question of Komjáth and Kunen we show (inZFC) that special Aronszajn lines are embeddable intoB ₁(ℝ). We also show that under Martin's Axiom a linearly ordered set ℒ with |ℒ| < 2^ω is embeddable intoB ₁(ℝ) iff ℒ does not contain a copy of ω₁ or ω _* ¹ . We present aZFC example of a linear order of size 2^ω showing that this characterisation is not valid for orders of size continuum. These results are obtained using the notion of a compact-special tree; that is, a tree that is embeddable into the class of compact subsets of the reals partially ordered under reverse inclusion. We investigate how this notion is related to the well-known notion of an ℝ-special tree and also to some other notions of specialness. Partially supported by Hungarian Scientific Foundation grant no. 37758, 49786 and F 43620. The second author's research for this paper was partially supported by NSERC of Canada.