The \(k\)-zero-divisor hypergraph of a commutative ring (Q925377)

Summary: The concept of the zero-divisor graph of a commutative ring has been studied by many authors, and the \(k\)-zero-divisor hypergraph of a commutative ring is a nice abstraction of this concept. Though some of the proofs in this paper are long and detailed, any reader familiar with zero-divisors is able to read through the exposition and find many of the results quite interesting. Let \(R\) be a commutative ring and \(k\) an integer strictly larger than 2. A \(k\)-uniform hypergraph \(H_k(R)\) with the vertex set \(\mathbb Z(R,k)\), the set of all \(k\)-zero-divisors in \(R\), is associated to \(R\), where each \(k\)-subset of \(\mathbb Z(R,k)\) that satisfies the \(k\)-zero-divisor condition is an edge in \(H_k(R)\). It is shown that if \(R\) has two prime ideals \(P_1\) and \(P_2\) with zero their only common point, then \(H_k(R)\) is a bipartite (2-colorable) hypergraph with partition sets \(P_1-\mathbb Z'\) and \(P_2-\mathbb Z'\), where \(\mathbb Z'\) is the set of all zero divisors of \(R\) which are not \(k\)-zero-divisors in \(R\) . If \(R\) has a nonzero nilpotent element, then a lower bound for the clique number of \(H_3(R)\) is found. Also, we have shown that \(H_3(R)\) is connected with diameter at most 4 whenever \(x^2\neq 0\) for all 3-zero-divisors \(x\) of \(R\). Finally, it is shown that for any finite nonlocal ring \(R\), the hypergraph \(H_3(R)\) is complete if and only if \(R\) is isomorphic to \(\mathbb Z_2\times \mathbb Z_2\times \mathbb Z_2\).