Depth and regularity of monomial ideals via polarization and combinatorial optimization (Q2000807)

Let \(R=K[x_{1},\dots,x_{n}]\) be a polynomial ring over a field \(K\). Let \(I\) be a monomial ideal of \(R\). The authors establish the depth and regularity formulas of \(R/I\) and \(R/(I,f)\) using the polarizations of \(I\) and \((I,f)\) where \(f\) is a monomial in \(R\) ( Proposition 2.11). They use this to study the behavior of the depth and regularity of \(R/I\), locally at a variable \(x_{i}\), when one lowers the degree of all the highest powers of the variable \(x_{i}\) occurring in the minimal generating set of \(I\). They show that the depth is locally non-decreasing at each variable \(x_{i}\) when lowering the top degree ( Theorem 3.1). They later examine the depth and regularity of powers and symbolic powers of edge ideals of clutters and graphs, and their ideals of covers. Let \(I(C)\) be the edge ideal of an unmixed clutter \(C\) with the max-flow min-cut property then the powers of \(I(C)\) have non-increasing depth and non-decreasing regularity (Theorem 4.9). Let \(G\) be a strongly perfect graph and let \(\text{cl}(G)\) be its clique clutter. If \(J\) is the ideal of covers of \(\text{cl}(G)\), then symbolic powers of \(J\) have non-increasing depth and non-decreasing regularity (Proposition 5.8).