Linearity defects of face rings (Q2382990)

The authors study the linear defect of square-free monomial ideals over polynomial rings and over exterior algebras. Working over an affine semigroup ring over a field \(K\) they show that for a non-empty order ideal \(\Delta\), the linear defect of the irreducible resolution of \(K[\Delta]\) depends only on the topological space \(| \Delta | \). Note that this is for fixed \(K\) and results depend on char\((K)\). Working over an exterior algebra \(E\) in \(n\) variables, the authors show that if \(N\) is a square-free module over \(E\) and if \(\mathcal{S}(N)\) is the corresponding square-free module over a polynomial ring \(S\) in \(n\) variables, then \(\text{ld}_E (N)=\text{ld}_S(\mathcal{S}(N))\leq n-1\). For a simplicial complex \(\Delta\) such that the ideal \(I_{\Delta}\) is not \((0)\), they show that the linear defect \(\text{ld}_S(I_{\Delta})\) is a topological invariant of the geometric realization of the Alexander dual of \(\Delta\). The authors then bound the linear defect of a simplicial complex by \(\text{ld}(\Delta) \leq { \text{max}} \{ 1, n-2\}\). They also show that for \(n \geq 4\), \(\text{ld}(\Delta )=n-2\) if and only if \(\Delta\) is an \(n\)-gon.