Approximate isomorphism of metric structures

Abstract

We give a formalism for approximate isomorphism in continuous logic simultaneously generalizing those of two papers by Ben Yaacov [2] and by Ben Yaacov, Doucha, Nies, and Tsankov [6], which are largely incompatible. With this we explicitly exhibit Scott sentences for the perturbation systems of the former paper, such as the Banach-Mazur distance and the Lipschitz distance between metric spaces. Our formalism is simultaneously characterized syntactically by a mild generalization of perturbation systems and semantically by certain elementary classes of two-sorted structures that witness approximate isomorphism. As an application, we show that the theory of any $R$-tree or ultrametric space of finite radius is stable, improving a result of Carlisle and Henson [8].