Semicontinuity for representations of one-dimensional Cohen-Macaulay rings (Q1817311)

``Algebraic families'' of modules and algebras play an important role in several questions of representation theory. It is often especially useful to know that some ``discrete invariants'' are constant or, at least, are semi-continuous in such families, that is they can change only in ``exceptional points'' which form a family of smaller dimension. Perhaps the best known results in this direction are those of Gabriel and Knörrer. Gabriel proved that finite representation type is an open condition for finite dimensional algebras (``fat points''), while Knörrer showed that the number of parameters for modules of prescribed rank is semicontinuous in families of commutative Cohen-Macaulay rings of Krull dimension 1 (``curve singularities''). Knörrer's theorem was used to show that the unimodal singularities of type \(T_{pq}\) are of tame Cohen-Macaulay type. Unfortunately, the arguments of Knörrer do not work in the non-commutative case. The aim of this paper is to refine them in such a way that they could be applied to non-commutative Cohen-Macaulay algebras, too. For this purpose we introduce the notion of ``dense subrings'' which seems rather technical but, nevertheless, useful. It enables the construction of ``almost versal'' families of modules for a given algebra (cf. Theorem 3.5) and the definition of the ``number of parameters''. Just as in the commutative case, it is important that the bases of these ``almost versal'' families are projective varieties. Once having this, we are able to prove an analogue of Knörrer's theorem (cf. Theorem 4.9) and a certain variant (cf. Theorem 4.11) which turns out to be useful, for instance, to extend the tameness criterion for commutative algebras to the case of characteristic 2. The semicontinuity implies, in particular, that the set of so-called ``wild algebras'' in any family is a countable union of closed subsets. A very exciting problem is whether it is actually closed, hence whether the set of tame algebras is open. However, Theorem 4.9, together with the results of the authors [Compos. Math. 89, No. 3, 315-338 (1993; Zbl 0794.14010)] imply that tame is indeed an open property for curve singularities (commutative one-dimensional Cohen-Macaulay rings). An analogous procedure leads to the semicontinuity of the number of parameters in other cases, like representations of finite dimensional algebras or elements of finite dimensional bimodules.