Behavior of test ideals under smooth and étale homomorphisms. (Q5957506)

In the past few years, there have been a number of papers that address the behavior of tight closure under flat maps. The localization problem in tight closure and the circle of conjectures on F-regularity, test ideals and the tight closure of zero in the injective hull of the residue field of a local ring, which are all related to the localization problem, speak of the importance of such a direction of research. In the paper under review, the authors study the behavior of the test ideal under smooth and étale maps. The results show that, in essence, if the certain conjectures related to the localization problem have an affirmative answer, then the test ideal \(\tau_A\) of a ring \(A\) behaves nicely under such maps. To be precise, let us state two of the main results of the paper: Theorem 5.1. Let \(A \to D\) be a locally of finite type smooth homomorphism of reduced excellent rings of positive characteristic \(p >0\). Suppose that test ideals commute with localization and that for each maximal ideal \(m\) of \(A\), \(A_m/ mA_m\) is perfect. Then \(\tau_A D = \tau _D\). Theorem 6.1. Let \(A \to S\) be a finite flat homomorphism of normal rings, étale in codimension~\(1\). Assume that \((A, m)\) is local and excellent, \(0^{*fg}_{E_A} = 0^*_{E_{A}}\), \(0^{*fg}_{E_D} = 0^*_{E_{D}}\), and that \(S/mS\) is Gorenstein. Then \(\tau_A S = \tau_S\). It should be noted that the hypotheses are general enough to make the results applicable to various situations. Test ideals commute with localization for reduced local excellent rings, and \(0^{*fg}_{E_R} = 0^*_{E_{R}}\) holds true for local rings \(R\) that are either \(\mathbb{Q}\)-Gorenstein, localizations of \(\mathbb{N}\)-graded rings at the unique maximal homogeneous ideal, or Cohen-Macaulay with an isolated non-Gorenstein point. The interested reader can find related work on the behavior of test ideal with respect to flat base change in a paper by \textit{G.~Lyubeznik} and \textit{K.~E.~Smith} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 353, No.8, 3149-3180 (2001; Zbl 0977.13002)], as well as by \textit{I.~M.~Aberbach} and \textit{F.~Enescu} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 355, No.2, 619-636 (2003; Zbl 1019.13002)].