Closure operations in complete local rings of mixed characteristic (Q831299)

Different types of closure operations have been successfully applied to various homological conjectures in commutative algebra in the past. For instance in equicharacteristic \(p>0,\) tight closure was introduced and applied to prove the existence of balanced big Cohen-Macaulay algebras for rings containing a field by Mel Hochster and Craig Huneke. In mixed characteristic Raymond Heitmann introduced four new closure operations and for the \textit{epf} closure operation he proved that it satisfies the (usual) colon-capturing property for rings of dimension at most 3 [\textit{R. C. Heitmann}, J. Algebra 238, No. 2, 801--826 (2001; Zbl 1036.13007)]. As a byproduct of this he was able to prove the direct summand conjecture in the case the underlying ring has dimension less than or equal to 3. Further relations between closure operations and the existence of balanced big Cohen-Macaulay algebras (modules) were explored by Geoffrey Dietz, who proved that a local domain \(R\) has a closure operation satisfies certain axioms (read Dietz closure) if and only if it has a balanced big Cohen-Macaulay module [\textit{G. D. Dietz}, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 138, No. 11, 3849--3862 (2010; Zbl 1206.13017)]. The ``certain axioms'' mentioned in the previous sentence is a set seven axioms introduced Dietz in the same paper for ``good closure operations''. Any closure operation satisying all of the Dietz's axioms is called \textit{Dietz closure}. The paper under review introduces a new closure operation called \textit{weak epf} or \textit{wepf}. It is proved that \textit{wepf} is a Dietz closure and also satsfies the algebra axiom of [\textit{R. R.G.}, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 222, No. 7, 1878--1897 (2018; Zbl 1470.13033)]. This yields a new proof of the existence of big Cohen-Macaulay algebras (modules). Another interesting result of the paper is the extension of the result of Raymond C. Heitmann and Linquan Ma on the colon-capturing property of \textit{epf}. The author proves that \textit{epf}-closure satisfies the \(p\)-colon-capturing property for ideals generated by a part of system of parameters (see Theorem 3.4). This result in fact serves as the motivation for the introduction of the closure operation \textit{wepf} mentioned above. More precisely Theorem 3.4. Let \(R\) be a complete local domain of mixed characteristic \(p\) with an \(F\)-finite residue field. Then all systems of parameters in \(R\) satisfy \(p\)-colon-capturing. The \(p\)-colon-capturing property is also used to prove that the closure operation \textit{r1f} is a Dietz closure satisfying the algebra axiom. In addition to the above the author generalizes a result of Mel Hochster and Craig Huneke about ``phantom extensions''. More precisely it is proved that every module-finite extension of a complete local domain of mixed characteristic with an \(F\) -finite residue field is epf-phantom (Theorem 5.1). This result is interesting because, along with a result of Heitmann and Ma, it yields a new proof of the direct summand conjecture. Theorem 5.1. If \(R\rightarrow S\) is a module-finite extension of complete local domains of mixed characteristic \(p\) with an \(F\) -finite residue field, then this map is \textit{epf}-phantom. Finally, a number of related results are also proved in characteristic \(p\). The paper closes with some open questions in the field.