The valuation theory of deeply ramified fields and its connection with defect extensions

We study in detail the valuation theory of deeply ramified fields and introduce and investigate several other related classes of valued fields. Further, a classification of defect extensions of prime degree of valued fields that was earlier given only for the equicharacteristic case is generalized to the case of mixed characteristic by a unified definition that works simultaneously for both cases. It is shown that deeply ramified fields and the other valued fields we introduce only admit one of the two types of defect extensions, namely the ones that appear to be more harmless in open problems such as local uniformization and the model theory of valued fields in positive characteristic. We use our knowledge about such defect extensions to give a new, valuation theoretic proof of the fact that algebraic extensions of deeply ramified fields are again deeply ramified. We also prove finite descent, and under certain conditions even infinite descent, for deeply ramified fields. These results are also proved for two other related classes of valued fields. The classes of valued fields under consideration can be seen as generalizations of the class of tame valued fields. Our paper supports the hope that it will be possible to generalize to deeply ramified fields several important results that have been proven for tame fields and were at the core of partial solutions of the two open problems mentioned above.