A polynomial bound on the regularity of an ideal in terms of half of the syzygies (Q2391623)

As the title suggests, this paper gives new types of bounds of the regularity of an ideal in a polynomial ring. Let \(K\) be a field and \(S = K[x_1,\ldots,x_n]\) be a polynomial ring with \(I\) a homogenous ideal in \(S\). There have been many bounds on regularity of \(I\). For instance it has been shown that if \(I\) is generated in degrees at most \(d\), then \[ \mathrm{reg}(I) \leq (2d)^{2^{n-2}}. \] (The characteristic 0 case is due to \textit{A. Galligo} [Ann. Inst. Fourier 29, No. 2, 107--184 (1979; Zbl 0412.32011)] and \textit{M. Giusti} [Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 174, 159--171 (1984; Zbl 0585.13010)] while any characteristic was shown in [\textit{G. Caviglia} and \textit{E. Sbarra}, Compos. Math. 141, No. 6, 1365--1373 (2005; Zbl 1100.13020)]). This doubly exponential growth cannot be avoided as shown by \textit{D. Bayer} and \textit{M. Stillman} [J. Symb. Comput. 6, No. 2--3, 135--147 (1988; Zbl 0667.68053)] concerning the example in [\textit{E. Mayr} and \textit{A. Meyer}, Adv. Math. 46, 305--329 (1982; Zbl 0506.03007)]. The author notes that this examples (along with others) have large regularity by the first syzygy of the ideal \(I\). This was the motivation of the current paper. Setting \(t_i = \mathrm{reg}(\mathrm{tor}_i^S(S/I,K))\), the maximal degree of an \(i\)th syzygy of \(S/I\), various bounds are shown on \(t_i\) for \(i > \lceil \frac{n}{2} \rceil\) in terms of the previous \(t_i\). This allows for the main result, bounds on the regularity of \(S/I\) in terms of the first half of the \(t_i\), not just the degrees of the generators of \(I\). In particular, if \(h = \lceil \frac{n}{2} \rceil\), then \[ \mathrm{reg}(S/I) \leq \sum_{i = 1}^h t_i + \frac{\prod_{i = 1}^h t_i}{(h-1)!}. \] Another interesting bound is given that recovers a low-dimensional result of \textit{D. Eisenbud} et al. [Am. J. Math. 128, No. 3, 573--605 (2006; Zbl 1105.13017)]. That is, if \(p = \mathrm{pd}(S/I)\), then \[ \mathrm{reg}(S/I) \leq \max\{t_i + t_{p-i} - p\,|\, i = 1,\ldots,p-1\}. \] Bounds for arbitrary modules are given as well, but are much smaller than the known bounds based solely in terms of \(t_1\). The proofs of these results rely heavily on Boij-Söderberg theory and a nice review is given in the third section of the paper.