Vanishing of Tor, and why we care about it (Q472987)

The so called homological conjectures are an active area of research in commutative algebra (see [\textit{M. Hochster}, Topics in the homological theory of modules over commutative rings. Regional Conference Series in Mathematics. No. 24. Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society (1975; Zbl 0302.13003); Ill. J. Math. 51, No. 1, 151--169 (2007; Zbl 1127.13010)]). One of them was the rigidity conjecture: a finite module \(M\) over a noetherian local ring \(A\) is said to be rigid if for any finite \(A\)-module \(W\) and any \(i \geq 1\), \(\mathrm{Tor}_i^A(M,W)=0\) implies \(\mathrm{Tor}_j^A(M,W)=0\) for all \(j \geq i\), and the rigidity conjecture said that if \(M\) is of finite projective dimension then it is rigid. While this conjecture is true for regular local rings (Lichtenbaum), it turned out to be false in general (Heitmann). However, many related problems concerning the vanishing of Tor remain open and interesting (mainly over complete intersection rings). This beautiful paper is an excellent survey on recent results in this area of research.