Regularity and Koszul property of symbolic powers of monomial ideals (Q2043083)

Let \(I\subset R = k[x_1,\dots,x_r]\) be a homogeneous ideal. The results of this article address the regularity, \(\operatorname{reg} I^{(n)}\), and the maximal generating degree, \(\omega(I^{(n)})\), of symbolic powers of monomial ideals, defined here as \[ I^{(n)} = \bigcap_{\mathfrak{p}} (I^n R_{\mathfrak{p}} \cap R), \] where the intersection is over all \textit{minimal} associated primes of \(I\). It is proved that, for any monomial ideal \(I\subset R\), \[ \lim \frac{\operatorname{reg} I^{(n)}}{n} = \delta(I) = \lim \frac{\omega(I^{(n)})}{n}, \] where \(\delta(I)\) is the maximum of \(|\mathbf{v}|=v_1+\cdots+v_r\), where \(\mathbf{v}=(v_1,\dots,v_r)\) varies in the set of vertices of a polyhedron in \(\mathbb{R}^r\), defined as the intersection of the Newton polyhedra of the primary components of \(I\) associated to the minimal primes. These equalities are proved in theorems 3.3 and 3.6. Section 4 specializes to cover ideals of graphs. Theorem 4.6 gives a combinatorial formula for \(\delta(J_G)\) where \(J_G\subset R\) is the cover ideal of a graph \(G\) without isolated vertices. In particular (Corollary 4.7) bounds for this invariant are obtained. These bounds involve, \(\tau_{\max}(G)\) the maximal cardinality of a minimal vertex cover of \(G\). Theorem 4.9 establishes the equalities \[ \delta(J(G))=\omega(J(G))=\tau_{\max}(G) \] when \(G\) is either bipartite, or unmixed, or claw-free. The last section consists of the construction of an example of an equidimensional, height \(2\), square-free, monomial ideal for which \(\omega(I^{(n)})\) and \(\operatorname{reg} I^{(n)}\) are not eventually linear functions. The ideal in question is the cover ideal of the graph obtained by adding a fixed number of pendants to each vertex of a complete graph. In Theorem 5.15, it is shown that for such \(G\), \[ \operatorname{reg} J_G^{(n)} = \omega(J_G^{(n)}) = (m+s-1)n + (m-2)(s-1)\left\lfloor\frac{n}{2} \right\rfloor, \] where \(m\) is the number of vertices of the original complete graph and \(s\) is the number of pendants added to each of its vertices. The proof of this result relies on the Koszul property of \(J_G^{(n)}\) which is verified using a technique introduced in Theorem 5.1.