Semi-local formal fibers of minimal prime ideals of excellent reduced local rings (Q412567)

The relationship between a local ring and its completion has been extensively studied in the literature. One of the main questions is as follows: if \(T\) is a complete local ring, does there exist a local subring \(A\) of \(T\), with some desired property, whose completion is \(T\)? In the paper under review the authors provide results when the property on \(A\) is that it be an excellent reduced ring such that the formal fibers of its minimal prime ideals are semi-local and can be prescribed. (They also consider the case where \(A\) is not required to be excellent.) More concretely, let \(T\) be a complete local (Noetherian) ring containing the rationals, and let \(\mathcal C\) be a finite set of incomparable non-maximal prime ideals of \(T\) partitioned into \(m\) subsets \(\mathcal C_1, \dots, \mathcal C_m\). The authors find necessary and sufficient conditions for \(T\) to be the completion of an excellent reduced local ring \(A\) with precisely \(m\) minimal prime ideals \(J_1,\dots, J_m\) such that, for each \(i=1,2,\dots, m\), the maximal elements of the set \(\{Q\in\text{Spec } T\,|\,Q\cap A=J_i\}\) are precisely the elements of \(\mathcal C_i\). They also find necessary and sufficient conditions for \(T\) to be the completion of such a ring \(A\) for the case where \(A\) need not be excellent.