A duality in Buchsbaum rings and triangulated manifolds (Q2397616)

In the paper under review, the authors study an algebraic duality of Stanley-Reisner rings of triangulated homology manifolds with nonempty boundary. Let \(\Delta\) be a triangulated homology ball whose boundary complex is \(\partial \Delta\). A result of Hochster asserts that the canonical module of the Stanley-Reisner ring \(\mathbb{F}[\Delta]\) of \(\Delta\) is isomorphic to the Stanley-Reisner module \(\mathbb{F}[\Delta, \partial \Delta]\) of the pair \((\Delta, \partial \Delta)\). This result implies that an Artinian reduction of \(\mathbb{F}[\Delta, \partial \Delta]\) is (up to a shift in grading) isomorphic to the Matlis dual of the corresponding Artinian reduction of \(\mathbb{F}[\Delta]\). In this paper, the authors establish a generalization of this duality to all triangulations of connected orientable homology manifolds with boundary. They also provide an explicit algebraic interpretation of the \(h''\)-numbers of Buchsbaum complexes and use it to prove the monotonicity of \(h''\)-numbers for pairs of Buchsbaum complexes as well as the unimodality of \(h''\)-vectors of barycentric subdivisions of Buchsbaum polyhedral complexes. They also provide applications to the algebraic manifold \(g\)-conjecture.