Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of projective monomial varieties of codimension two (Q2457389)

The paper under review studies the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of codimension two projective monomial varieties, which are defined in the following way: Consider \(K\) an algebraically closed field and the polynomial ring \(K[z,y,x_1,\dots,x_n]\). For \(n \geq 2\) let \(a\) be a positive integer and \(b=(b_1, \dots,b_n)\neq c=(c_1,\dots,c_n)\) two different \(n\)-uples of positive integers such that \(\sum_{i=1}^nb_i=\sum_{i=1}^nc_i=a\). A codimension two projective monomial variety \({\mathcal V} \subset {\mathbb P}^{n+1}\) is parametrically defined by \(z=u_1^{b_1}\dots u_n^{b_n}\), \(y=u_1^{c_1}\dots u_n^{c_n}\), \(x_i=u_i^{a}\) (\(1 \leq i \leq n\)). In particular it is a projective toric variety. The main idea of the paper is that the authors can compute the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of these varieties (denoted by reg\(({\mathcal V})\)) without constructing a minimal graded free resolution of the ideal \(I({\mathcal V})\) of \({\mathcal V}\). In fact they associate a monomial ideal to \(I({\mathcal V})\) with its same regularity and nice combinatorial properties which allows them to compute its regularity. Hence, they provide an explicit formula for reg\(({\mathcal V})\) in terms of a particular set of minimal generators of \(I({\mathcal V})\), namely, the reduced Gröbner basis of \(I({\mathcal V})\) with respect to the reverse lexicographic order (see Thm. 2.5 and 2.8 for explicit results). From this formula some known results on toric codimension two varieties can be recovered, in particular the regularity conjecture reg\(({\mathcal V}) \leq\) deg \(({\mathcal V})-1\) turns to be true. Moreover the authors are able to classify codimension two projective monomial varieties where equality reg\(({\mathcal V}) =\) deg \(({\mathcal V})-1\) holds (see Thm. 3.6).