Almost Gorenstein rings - towards a theory of higher dimension (Q2259179)

Almost Gorenstein local rings of dimension one were originally introduced in 1997 by \textit{V. Barucci} and \textit{R. Fröberg} [J. Algebra 188, No. 2, 418--442, Art. No. JA966837 (1997; Zbl 0874.13018)] in the case where the local rings are analytically unramified. In 2013 Goto, Matsuoka, and Phuong [\textit{S. Goto} et al., J. Algebra 379, 355--381 (2013; Zbl 1279.13035)] posed a modified definition of one-dimensional almost Gorenstein local rings, which works well also in the case where the rings are analytically ramified. The paper under review gives the notion of almost Gorenstein local rings in higher dimensional cases, and develops the basic theory of this object, in which the authors extend possibly known results in the one-dimensional case. They explore basic properties of almost Gorenstein local rings, including the so-called non-zerodivisor characterization; gave a characterization of almost Gorenstein local rings in terms of the existence of certain exact sequences of modules; gave a characterization of almost Gorenstein local rings in terms of canonical ideals; study the question of when the idealization \(A =R\ltimes X\) of a given \(R\)-module \(X\) is an almost Gorenstein local ring; explore a special class of almost Gorenstein local rings, which they called semi-Gorenstein. They also pose and explore the graded version of this theory: they search for possible definitions of almost Gorenstein graded rings; study almost Gorensteinness in the graded rings associated to filtrations of ideals; explored Cohen-Macaulay homogeneous rings \(R=k[R_1]\) over an infinite field \(k=R_0\); studied the relation between the almost Gorensteinness of Cohen-Macaulay local rings \((R, \mathfrak m)\) and their tangent cones \(\mathrm{gr}_{\mathfrak m}(R) =\bigoplus_{n\geq 0}\mathfrak m^n/\mathfrak m^{n+1}\); proved that every one-dimensional Cohen-Macaulay complete local ring of finite Cohen-Macaulay representation type is an almost Gorenstein local ring, if it possesses a coefficient field of characteristic 0.