G-biliaison of ladder pfaffian varieties (Q1028311)

An important problem in liaison theory is to understand which homogeneous ideals (or projective subschemes) are in the Gorenstein liaison class of a complete intersection; \textit{glicci} for short. One hope would be to show that all arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay (ACM) subschemes of projective space are glicci, thus making the ACM property equivalent to the glicci property. This extends the long-standing question of studying which ideals or subschemes are in the complete intersection liaison class of a complete intersection; \textit{licci} for short. In this setting it is not true that ACM is equivalent to licci, except in one case: an important classical result, due to Gaeta, is that the ideal defined by the maximal minors of a \(t \times (t+1)\) homogeneous matrix is licci, as long as it has height two; this means that all codimension two ACM subschemes are licci. This motivated the first important large class of ideals that were shown to be glicci: it was shown by \textit{J. O. Kleppe, J. C. Migliore, R. Miró-Roig, U. Nagel} and \textit{C. Peterson} in [Mem. Am. Math. Soc. 732 (2001; Zbl 1006.14018)] that the ideal defined by the maximal minors of a \(t \times (t+c)\) homogeneous matrix is glicci, as long as it has height \(c+1\); this ideal is not licci in general. Other special cases have been shown. The article under review gives a nice argument adding to this list of known cases. Specifically, it is shown that the ideals generated by pfaffians of mixed size contained in a subladder of a skew-symmetric matrix of indeterminates define ACM, projectively normal, reduced and irreducible projective varieties, and these varieties are glicci.