The Artinian Berger conjecture (Q1266195)

There is a conjecture (called ``BC'' in the paper), made by the referee some thirty years ago, that the differential module of the local ring \(R\) of a point of a reduced algebraic curve over a perfect field \(k\) be torsionfree if and only if the point is not a singular point. The nontrivial part is that the torsionfreeness of the differential module implies its freeness, which is well known to be equivalent to the regularity of the point. Many attempts have been made to prove this, but so far only special cases were treated successfully. Some of them are referenced in the article. The authors now state an analogous conjecture in the zero-dimensional case, which they call the ``Artinian Berger conjecture'' (ABC), and from which the above conjecture follows if \(\text{char}(k)=0\). This is the ``main theorem'' of the article. The principal tool for the proof is the very technical theorem 1.2 about a connection between the differential module and Hochschild homology. The proof of it is postponed to the last section which deals with relative Hochschild homology. Applying the results of the article to ``BC'' one obtains, among new proofs of known results, one new case in which ``BC'' holds: If \(\text{char}(k)=0\) and the cube of the maximal ideal of \(R\) lies in the conductor of the normalization of \(R\) into \(R\). To explain the ``ABC'' one needs some preliminaries: A principal ideal algebra is a finite commutative \(k\)-algebra so that every ideal is generated by one element. If \(k\) is a perfect field, every such algebra \(B\) is a finite product of truncated polynomial rings \(B_i=K_i[s]/(s^{n_i})\), where the \(K_i\) are finite field extensions of \(k\). It is called tame if either \(\text{char}(k)=0\) or \(\text{char}(k)=p>0\) and, for all \(i\), \(p\) does not divide \(n_i\). Motivated by the observation that in the one-dimensional reduced case the torsion of the differential module is the kernel of the natural homomorphism \(\Omega_{R/k}\to\Omega_{S/k}\), where \(S\) denotes the normalization of \(R\), an Artinian analogue \(\tau(A)\) of the torsion submodule of the differential module is defined as follows: Let \(A\) be a finite dimensional commutative \(k\)-algebra over a perfect field \(k\) and \(\Omega_{A/k}\) its Kähler differential module. Consider the family \({\mathcal F}\) of submodules of \(\Omega_{A/k}\) which arise as kernels of the maps \(f_*:\Omega_{A/k}\to\Omega_{B/k}\) induced by algebra homomorphisms \(f:A\to B\) into all tame principal ideal algebras \(B\). Since \(\Omega_{A/k}\) is Artinian there is a unique minimal element in \({\mathcal F}\) denoted by \(\tau(A)\). Now ``ABC'' says: \[ \tau(A)=0\Leftrightarrow A\text{ is a tame principal ideal algebra}. \] In section 1 the authors prove the ``main theorem'' and, as corollaries to the proof give simple proofs of ``BC'' in the known cases of seminormal algebras in any characteristic and for graded algebras in characteristic zero. Section two gives ``evidence for the truth of ABC''. Many technical lemmas are proven. A reformulaton of ``ABC'' states: If \(A\) is a subalgebra of a tame principal ideal algebra \(B\) such that the canonical homomorphism \(\Omega_{A/k}\to\Omega_{B/k}\) is injective then \(A\) is a tame principal ideal algebra. ``ABC'' is shown to hold for several classes of finite \(k\)-algebras \(A\), especially in case where \(A\) is local with maximal ideal \(M\) such that \(M^3=0\). From this follows the new case for ``BC'', if the cube of the maximal ideal of \(R\) lies in the conductor of the normalization of \(R\) into \(R\). Section 3 contains the homological tools needed in the first two sections.