Ideals generated by 2-minors, collections of cells and stack polyominoes (Q1758439)

A binomial edge ideal is an ideal generated by an arbitrary collection of 2-minors of a \(2\times n\) matrix whose entries are all indeterminates. Thus the generators of such an ideal are of the form \(f_{ij}=x_iy_j-x_jy_i\) with \(i<j\). We associate with such an ideal the graph \(G\) on the vertex set \([n]\) for which \(\{i, j\}\) is an edge if and only if \(f_{ij}\) belongs to our ideal. The binomial edge ideal of graph \(G\) is denoted by \(J_G\). It is shown in [\textit{J. Herzog} et al., Adv. Appl. Math. 45, No. 3, 317--333 (2010; Zbl 1196.13018)] Corollary 2.2 that \(J_G\) is radical ideal and primary decomposition of \(J_G\) is given in Theorem 3.2. This paper deals with the study of ideals generated by 2-minors of a collection of cells. A cell is a unit square of \(\mathbb{R}^2\) whose corners are elements in \(\mathbb{N}^2\) and a collection \(\mathcal{P}\) of cells is a finite union of cells. The set of corners belonging to the cells of \( \mathcal{P}\) is denoted by \(V( \mathcal{P})\). Let \(S\) be the polynomial ring over the field \(K\) in the variable \(x_a\) where \(a \in V( \mathcal{P}).\) To each proper interval \([a, b]\) of \(\mathbb{N}^2\), we assign the binomial \(f_{a,b}=x_ax_b-x_cx_d\) where \(c\) and \(d\) are the anti-diagonal corners of \([a, b]\). A proper interval \([a, b]\) is called an inner interval of \(\mathcal{P}\) if all cells of \([a, b]\) belong to \(\mathcal{P}\). We denote by \(I_{\mathcal{P}}\) the ideal generated by the inner 2-minors of \(\mathcal{P}\) and set \(K[ \mathcal{P}]=S/I_{\mathcal{P}}\). The first main result of this paper says that, if \(\mathcal{P}\) be a convex collection of cells, then \(K[ \mathcal{P}]\) is a normal Cohen--Macaulay domain. It is also shown that \(I_{\mathcal{P}}\) is a prime ideal if each connected component of \(\mathcal{P}\) is row or column convex. Finally, for a special class of convex collection of sets, namely for stack polyominoes, the class group of \(K[ \mathcal{P}]\) is computed.