Combinatorial symbolic powers (Q2470395)

The main goal of this paper is to study symbolic powers in the combinatorial context of monomial ideals. In particular, the author is interested in square-free monomial ideals, in which case the ideal is radical and so the symbolic power is the same as the differential power when the base field is algebraically closed. The author discusses the relationships between symbolic powers and secant ideals, and defines an ideal \(I\) to be differentially perfect if the symbolic powers can be written recursively as the secant ideals plus products of smaller symbolic powers, or equivalently as a particular sum of products of secant powers. It is then shown that the edge ideal of a graph is differentially perfect if and only if the graph is perfect. The author gives some interesting criteria for determining when a particular monomial belongs to the symbolic power, or is a minimal generator of it, in terms of degrees and blowup hypergraphs. These criteria are used to give a computational version of the theorem by showing that a graph is perfect if and only if the symbolic powers of the edge ideal can be generated by particular products of monomials related to the cliques of the graph. In section four, the author studies incomparability graphs of posets and shows that their antichain ideals are differentially perfect, thus giving a formula for the symbolic powers similar to that given for perfect graphs, but with antichains playing the role of cliques. The author shows that comparability and incomparability graphs of a poset are Greene graphs, and poses some interesting open problems related to such graphs. In section five, the author uses delightful term orders to give conditions under which a Gröbner basis for an ideal, or more generally a secant ideal, can be used to create Gröbner bases of the symbolic powers of the (secant) ideal. The author then goes on in the final section to explore three classes of ideals where the ideals of secant varieties are generated by minors of matrices. By producing delight ful term orders where the minors form Gröbner bases and using the edge ideal structure of the initial ideal, the author is able to realize Gröbner bases for the symbolic powers of the ideals.