Coassociated primes of modules over a commutative ring. (Q4354285)

The theory of associated primes is very important in the study of modules over commutative Noetherian rings. For modules over non-Noetherian rings however, the classical associated primes do not behave so well, for example there exist non-trivial modules without associated primes. The notion of weakly associated primes of modules over a (not necessarily Noetherian) commutative ring, was introduced by Bourbaki. The prime ideal \({\mathfrak p}\) is weakly associated to \(M\) if there exists a cyclic submodule \(N\) of \(M\) such that \({\mathfrak p}\) is minimal among the prime ideals containing the annihilator \(N\). This paper continues the author's paper on coassociated primes (the dual notion of associated primes) [\textit{S. Yassemi}, Commun. Algebra 23, No. 4, 1473-1498 (1995; Zbl 0832.13004)], discussed here for a (not necessarily Noetherian) commutative ring \(R\). An \(R\)-module \(L\) is said to be cocyclic if it is an essential extension of a simple \(R\)-module. The concept of weakly coassociated prime of an \(R\)-module \(M\) is introduced as follows: A prime ideal \({\mathfrak p}\) of \(R\) is called a weakly coassociated prime of \(M\) if there exists a cocyclic homomorphic image \(L\) of \(M\) such that \({\mathfrak p}\) is minimal among the prime ideals containing the annihilator \(L\). It is shown that the new approach is equivalent to \textit{I. G. Macdonald}'s [in: Sympos. Math. 11, Algebra commut., Geometria, Conveni 1971/72, 23-43 (1973; Zbl 0271.13001)] when \(M\) has a secondary representation. In the last section some functorial results between the class of all \(R\)-modules \(M\) such that the zero submodule has primary decomposition (or \(M=0\)), and the class of all \(R\)-modules having secondary representation (or being zero), are proved.