\(\star\)-independence and special tight closure. (Q1599598)

It is well known that the tight closure of an ideal can be hard to compute. The paper under review introduces two interesting concepts, *-independence and the special tight closure, that allow one to understand better tight closure from a computational point of view. After defining and discussing the notion of *-independence, the author studies *-independent ideals in two-dimensional Cohen-Macaulay rings and relates the notion to various open questions in tight closure theory establishing its relevance. An interesting result is that finite projective dimension ideals in an analytically irreducible excellent local ring of characteristic \(p\) are *-independent. The second part of the paper introduces the special tight closure and studies this notion for normal graded domains over a perfect field, localized at the irrelevant ideal. In this context, the author proves a decomposition theorem for the tight closure of ideals, showing that the tight closure of an ideal is the sum between the special tight closure of the ideal and the ideal itself. She also shows that, for *-independent ideals, a stronger statement holds. The main result of this section was extended to more general local rings by \textit{C. Huneke} and \textit{A. Vraciu} in a subsequent paper [Nagoya Math. J. 170, 175--183 (2003; Zbl 1063.13006)].