Specializations of Ferrers ideals (Q1016022)

A Ferrers graph is a bipartite graph on two distinct vertex sets \(\{x_1,\dots, x_n\}\) and \(\{y_1, \dots , y_m\}\) with the property that if \((x_i, y_j)\) is an edge of \(G\), then so is \((x_p, y_q)\) for \(1\leq p \leq i\) and \(1 \leq q \leq j\). In addition, \((x_1, y_m)\) and \((x_n, y_1)\) are required to be edges of \(G.\) A Ferrers ideals is the edge ideal associated with a Ferrers graph. The central idea of this paper is to obtain other monomial ideals (in general non square-free) from Ferrers ideals, by means of a specialization process which, roughly speaking, consists in identifying each \(y\)-vertex with an \(x\)-vertex. The authors extend this specialization to the polyhedral cell complex that resolves the Ferrers ideals and obtain, under suitable hypotheses, a cellular minimal free resolution of the specialized Ferrers ideals. Various classes of ideals and graphs are given, which can be obtained as a specializations of Ferrers ideals; in particular, all threshold graphs and all strongly stable ideals generated in degree two can be obtained as such a specialization.