A class of strong diamond principles

In the context of large cardinals, the classical diamond principle 3κ is easily strengthened in natural ways. When κ is a measurable cardinal, for example, one might ask that a 3κ sequence anticipate every subset of κ not merely on a stationary set, but on a set of normal measure one. This is equivalent to the existence of a function ` ... κ → Vκ such that for any A ∈ H(κ) there is an embedding j : V → M having critical point κ with j(`)(κ) = A. This and the similar principles formulated for many other large cardinal notions, including weakly compact, indescribable, unfoldable, Ramsey, strongly unfoldable and strongly compact cardinals, are best conceived as an expression of the Laver function concept from supercompact cardinals for these weaker large cardinal notions. The resulting Laver diamond principles \ ? κ can hold or fail in a variety of interesting ways. The classical diamond principle 3κ, for an infinite cardinal κ, is a gem of modern infinite combinatorics; its reflections have illuminated the path of innumerable combinatorial constructions and unify an infinite amount of combinatorial information into a single, transparent statement. When κ exhibits any of a variety of large cardinal properties, however, the principle can be easily strengthened in natural ways, and in this article I introduce and survey the resulting class of strengthened principles, which I call the Laver diamond