Syntactic cut-elimination for a fragment of the modal mu-calculus

For some modal fixed point logics, there are deductive systems that enjoy syntactic cut-elimination. An early example is the system in Pliuskevicius (1991) [15] for LTL. More recent examples are the systems by the authors of this paper for the logic of common knowledge (Brunnler and Studer, 2009) [5] and by Hill and Poggiolesi (2010) for PDL [8], which are based on a form of deep inference. These logics can be seen as fragments of the modal mu-calculus. Here we are interested in how far this approach can be pushed in general. To this end, we introduce a nested sequent system with syntactic cut-elimination which is incomplete for the modal mu-calculus, but complete with respect to a restricted language that allows only fixed points of a certain form. This restricted language includes the logic of common knowledge and PDL. There is also a traditional sequent system for the modal mu-calculus by Jager et al. (2008) [9], without a syntactic cut-elimination procedure. We embed that system into ours and vice versa, thus establishing cut-elimination also for the shallow system, when only the restricted language is considered. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.