The Waldschmidt constant for squarefree monomial ideals (Q2520755)

In the present paper the authors study Waldschmidt constants for the so-called squarefree monomial ideals. The main results allow to compute these constants using, somehow surprisingly, linear programming methods. Before we formulate the results, let us recall some notions. An ideal \(I \subseteq R:= k[x_{1}, \dots, x_{n}]\), where \(k\) is an algebraically closed field of any characteristic, is a monomial ideal if \(I\) is generated by monomials, and \(I\) is a squarefree monomial ideal if it is generated by squarefree monomials. A hypergraph is an ordered pair \(H=(V,E)\) where \(V=\{x_{1}, \dots, x_{n}\}\) is the set of vertices, and \(E\) consists of subset of \(V\) such that if \(e_{i} \subseteq e_{j}\), then \(e_{i}=e_{j}\). The elements of \(E\) are called edges. For a given hypergraph \(H\) one can associated to \(H\) a squarefree monomial ideal \(I(H)\) called the edge ideal of \(H\) by \[ I(H) = \langle x_{i_{1}}x_{i_{2}} \cdots x_{i_{t}} | \{ x_{i_{1}}, \dots, x_{i_{t}}\} \in E \rangle. \] Recall that any homogeneous ideal \(I \subseteq k[x_{1}, \dots, x_{n}]\) has minimal primary decomposition \(I = Q_{1} \cap \dots \cap Q_{s}\) where \(\sqrt{Q_{i}} = P_{i}\) is a prime ideal. The set of associated primes of \(I\) is defined as \[ \mathrm{Ass}(I) = \{\sqrt{Q_{i}} \, | \, i = 1, \dots, s\}. \] Now the \(m\)-th symbolic power of \(I\), denoted by \(I^{(m)}\), is the ideal \[ I^{(m)} = \bigcap_{P\in \mathrm{Ass}(I)} (I^{m}R_{p} \cap R), \] where \(R_{P}\) denotes the localization of \(R\) at the prime ideal \(P\). Recall that for a nonzero homogeneous ideal \(I\) of \(R\), we define the initial degree \(\alpha(I) = \min \{d \,|\, I_{d} \neq 0\}\), and finally the Waldschmidt constant of \(I\) is defined to be \[ \widehat{\alpha}(I) = \lim_{m\rightarrow \infty} \frac{ \alpha(I^{(m)})}{m}. \] The main result of the note allows to compute \(\widehat{\alpha}\) for squarefree monomial ideals (which can be viewed as edge ideals of hypergraphs). Theorem 1. Suppose that \(H = (V,E)\) is a hypergraph with a non-trivial edge and denote by \(I(H)\) the associated edge ideal. Then \[ \widehat{\alpha}(I(H)) = \frac{ \chi^{*}(H)}{\chi^{*}(H)-1}, \] where \(\chi^{*}\) is the fractional chromatic number of \(H\) (see Definition 4.1 therein). It is worth pointing out that the key asset of the paper is that one can compute \(\widehat{\alpha}(I(H))\) using linear programming methods (Theorem 3.2 therein). Another result provides a Chudnovsky-like lower bound for Waldschmidt constants of squarefree monomial ideals. Let us recall that the big-height of \(I\), denoted by \(\text{big-height}(I)\), is the maximum of heights of \(P \in \mathrm{Ass}(I)\). Theorem 2. Let \(I\) be a squarefree monomial ideal with \(\text{big-height}(I) = e\). Then \[ \widehat{\alpha}(I) \geq \frac{ \alpha(I) + e -1}{e}. \] Let us also provide one interesting result for graphs, i.e., those with \(|e_{i}|=2\). For a given graph \(G\) the chromatic number, denoted by \(\chi(G)\), is the smallest integer \(k\) so that \(G\) admits a \(k\)-coloring, and the clique number \(\omega(G)\) is the number of vertices in a maximum clique in \(G\). Theorem 3. Let \(G\) be a nonempty graph with chromatic number \(\chi(G)\) and clique \(\omega(G)\), then \[ \frac{\chi(G)}{\chi(G)-1} \leq \widehat{\alpha}(I(G)) \leq \frac{ \omega(G)}{\omega(G)-1}. \]