Wide Aronszajn trees

A wide Aronszajn tree is a tree is size and height omega_1 but with no uncountable branch. Such trees arise naturally in the study of model-theoretic notions on models of size aleph_1 as well as in generalised descriptive set theory. In their 1994 paper devoted to various aspects of such trees, Mekler and Väänänen studied the so called weak embeddings between such trees, which are simply defined as strict-order preserving functions. Their work raised the question if under MA there exists a universal wide Aronszajn tree under such embeddings. We present a negative solution to this question, obtained in a paper to appear, joint with Shelah. We also discuss various connected notions and the history of the problem.