No label defined (Q4370149)

The paper under review is a survey of two articles by the author [Commun. Algebra 24, No. 6, 1971-1992 (1996; Zbl 0855.16005) and Gelfand-Kirillov and filter dimensions of simple affine algebras, J. Algebra (to appear)], where an important new tool, the filter dimension, fil.dim, was introduced to study infinite dimensional simple affine algebras over a field, as well as their modules. Such an algebra \(A\) is equipped with a finite dimensional filtration that arises naturally from a set of generators, and the filter dimension is, roughly speaking, a measure of the growth of this filtration. It can therefore be expected to be closely related to the Gelfand-Kirillov dimension \(\text{GK}(A)\) of \(A\). Generalizing Bernstein's inequality for the Weyl algebras, it is shown that \[ \text{GK}(A)\leq\text{GK}(M)\cdot(\text{fil.}\dim(A)+\max\{\text{fil.}\dim(A),1\}) \] for any nonzero finitely generated \(A\)-module \(M\). Using the filter dimension also allows to make the generally rather vague relationship between the Gelfand-Kirillov dimension and the Krull dimension, K.dim, more precise, at least for the case of a simple affine finitely partitive algebra \(A\) with \(\text{GK}(A)<\infty\), where the inequality \[ \text{K.}\dim(A)\leq\text{GK}(A)\cdot(1-(\text{fil.}\dim(A)+\max\{\text{fil.}\dim(A),1\})^{-1}) \] is established. As an application, the author shows that \(\text{fil.}\dim({\mathcal D}(B))=1\), where \(B\) is a regular integral domain that is an affine algebra over a field of characteristic zero and \({\mathcal D}(B)\) denotes its ring of differential operators. This is then used to establish the equality \(\text{K.}\dim({\mathcal D}(B))=\text{GK}({\mathcal D}(B))/2=\text{K.}\dim(B)\). Finally, the author extends the concepts of ``multiplicity'' and ``holonomicity'' to the filter dimension. In this context, a module \(M\) over a simple affine infinite dimensional algebra \(A\) is holonomic if \(\text{GK}(M)\) is as small as possible, that is, if the first inequality above is an equality. It is shown that for a large class of such algebras, a holonomic module \(M\) has finite length, with an upper bound given in terms of the multiplicities of \(M\) and \(A\). For the entire collection see [Zbl 0879.00041].