The derived sequence of a pre-Jaffard family (Q2141038)

The author introduces and studies pre-Jaffard and weakly Jaffard families of overrings of a commutative integral domain \(D\). The concept of pre-Jaffard family is obtained by relaxing the locally finite property of a Jaffard family to compactness in the Zariski topology. A weak Jaffard family is pre-Jaffard. Starting with a pre-Jaffard family \(\Theta\) of \(D\), the author defines recursively for each ordinal \(\alpha\) an overring \(T_{\alpha}\) of the domain \(D\) and a weakly Jaffard family \(\Theta_{\alpha}\) of \(T_{\alpha}\). The family of the overrings \(\{T_\alpha\}\) is called the derived sequence with respect to \(\Theta\). The minimal ordinal \(\alpha\) such that \(T_{\alpha}=T_{\alpha^{\prime}}\) for all \(\alpha^{\prime}>\alpha\), which is proved to exist, is called the Jaffard degree of the family \(\Theta\). Quoting from the authors' abstract, the derived sequence `allows to decompose stable semistar operations and singular length functions in more cases than what is allowed by Jaffard families.' The author applies his general results to the one-dimensional case. If the domain \(D\) is one-dimensional, then \(\{\Theta := D_{M} \mid M\in \text{Max}(D)\}\) is a pre-Jaffard family of \(D\). In this case the derived sequence is described purely topologically, and the Jaffard degree of \(\Theta\) is equal to the Cantor-Bendixson rank of \(\text{Max}(D)^{\text{inv}}\), where `inv' means the inverse topology.