Martin’s axiom has been very successful in deciding numerous questions such as the Souslin hypothesis. Can we find higher analogues that, for example, decide the $\kappa$-Souslin hypothesis and allow us to meet $< 2^\kappa$ dense open sets? If one is careful enough and imposes closure conditions and stronger forms of the $\kappa$-cc, one obtains the principle BA$_\kappa$, independently discovered by Baumgartner, Laver and Shelah. BA$_\kappa$ shares many similarities with Martin’s axiom but decides the $\kappa$-Souslin hypothesis in the wrong way.

I will use a supercompact cardinal to force the Proper Forcing Axiom (PFA). I will follow Baumgartner’s original argumet, but will use lottery sums instead of a Laver function.

While the consistency strength of PFA is quite high in the large cardinal hierarchy, it is reasonable to expect that tame fragments of PFA should require much weaker assumptions. I will present an argument of Hamkins and Johnstone (2008) which shows the consistency of PFA for posets preserving aleph_2 or aleph_3 from a strongly unfoldable cardinal, a much smaller large cardinal which is, roughly speaking, to strongness (or supercompactness) as weak compactness is to measurability.