No label defined (Q4370127)

This review essentially follows the introduction of the paper under review. The paper is a continuation of the authors' earlier research in part I [see Commutative algebra: Syzygies, multiplicities, and birational algebra: AMS-IMS-SIAM Summer Res. Conf., South Hadley 1992, Contemp. Math. 159, 73-93 (1994; Zbl 0854.13001)]. A general objective of these studies is to determine which partially ordered sets can occur as the prime spectrum, \(\text{Spec} (B)\), of a finitely generated birational extension \(B\) of \(R[x]\). The study is restricted to the case when \(R\) is semilocal and \(B=R[x,g_1/f_1, \dots, g_t/f_t]\), where \(t\) is a positive integer, each \(f_i\in R[x]- \bigcup^n_{j=1} {\mathfrak m}_j[x]\), where \({\mathfrak m}_1, \dots, {\mathfrak m}_n \) are the maximal ideals of \(R\), and \((f_i,g_i) R[x]\) is not contained in any height one prime of \(R[x]\). Such a ring \(B\) is referred to as an sfb-extension of \(R[x]\). The authors first prove that if \(R\) is of finite type over a countable field and \(B\) is a cyclic sfb-extension of \(R\), then \(\text{Spec} (B)\) is uniquely determined by the type of \(j\text{-Spec} (B)\), the \(j\)-spectrum of \(B\). They also give examples to show that the \(j\)-spectrum of noncyclic sfb-extensions can be much different from the cyclic case. Finally, they formulate an axiom on partially ordered sets that is satisfied by the \(j\)-spectra of sfb-extensions of \(R[x]\) for \(R\) local. They also described some procedure that they believe will realize a given ``feasible'' partially ordered set satisfying this axiom as the \(j\)-spectrum of an sfb-extension. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0872.00033].