Abstract In the study of the arithmetic degrees the $\omega \text {-REA}$ sets play a role analogous to the role the r.e. degrees play in the study of the Turing degrees. However, much less is known about the arithmetic degrees and the role of the $\omega \text {-REA}$ sets in that structure than about the Turing degrees. Indeed, even basic questions such as the existence of an $\omega \text {-REA}$ set of minimal arithmetic degree are open. This paper makes progress on this question by demonstrating that some promising approaches inspired by the analogy with the r.e. sets fail to show that no $\omega \text {-REA}$ set is arithmetically minimal. Finally, it constructs a $\prod ^0_{2}$ singleton of minimal arithmetic degree. Not only is this a result of considerable interest in its own right, constructions of $\prod ^0_{2}$ singletons often pave the way for constructions of $\omega \text {-REA}$ sets with similar properties. Along the way, a number of interesting results relating arithmetic reducibility and rates of growth are established.

Abstract Soare [20] proved that the maximal sets form an orbit in ${\cal E}$ . We consider here ${\cal D}$ -maximal sets, generalizations of maximal sets introduced by Herrmann and Kummer [12]. Some orbits of ${\cal D}$ -maximal sets are well understood, e.g., hemimaximal sets [8], but many are not. The goal of this paper is to define new invariants on computably enumerable sets and to use them to give a complete nontrivial classification of the ${\cal D}$ -maximal sets. Although these invariants help us to better understand the ${\cal D}$ -maximal sets, we use them to show that several classes of ${\cal D}$ -maximal sets break into infinitely many orbits.