Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity: Examples of curves and surfaces. (Q1419017)

The broad question addressed in this paper is what may happen to the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of subschemes of projective space under certain geometric actions. For instance, \textit{M. S. Ravi} [Manuscr. Math. 68, 77--87 (1990; Zbl 0716.13001)] asked whether it is possible for the regularity to increase if we pass to the radical or remove embedded primes (in the latter case, the variety must be of dimension at least two for there to be a chance). The authors show that this sort of phenomenon can indeed happen, by a variety of clever examples. They also study the effect on the depth (of a surface) when embedded components are removed, and show that this can decrease! The first set of examples is built on certain monomial curves, and gives ideals consisting of more than one component (at least one non-reduced), where the radical has larger regularity than the original ideal (and even much larger). The next set of examples focuses on the surface case, this time using monomial surfaces. In this case the authors also give vanishing theorems for cohomology.