The core of ideals in arbitrary characteristic (Q841535)

The purpose of this paper is to find an explicit formula for the core of an ideal. If \(I\) is an ideal of a Noetherian ring \(R\), the core of \(I\) is the intersection of all reductions, or of all minimal reductions when \(R\) is local, of \(I\). In an earlier paper, Polini and Ulrich have shown that if \(R\) is a Gorenstein local ring with infinite residue field, \(I\) satisfies \(\mathcal{F}_1\) and certain depth conditions on its powers, and \(J\) is a minimal reduction of \(I\), then in in characteristic \(0\) or in sufficiently large characteristic, core\((I)=J^{n+1}:I^n\) for sufficiently large \(n\). In this paper, the authors give conditions under which this formula for the core holds in arbitrary characteristic. Minimal reductions arise from Noether normalizations of the special fiber ring \(\mathcal{F(I)}\), so this ring, along with its dimension \(\ell(I)\), the analytic spread of \(I\), naturally plays a role in determining the core of \(I\). The main result of the paper is to show that if \(R\) is a Gorenstein local ring with infinite perfect residue field, \(I\) has positive height \(g\) and satisfies \(G_{\ell}\), \(\mathcal{F(I)}\) has embedding dimension at most one locally at every minimal prime of dimension \(\ell\), and depth\(R/I^j \geq\) dim\(R/I-j+1\) for \(1 \leq j\leq \ell-g\), then core\((I)=J^{n+1}:I^n\) for every minimal reduction \(J\) of \(I\) with \(r_J(I)=r\) and for every \(n \geq \max \{r-\ell +g, 0\}\). If \(g=\ell(I)\), Gorenstein can be replaced by Cohen-Macaulay. The theorem is proven by using a geometric residual intersection to reduce to the case of equimultiple ideals of height one. To ``lift'' the formula back to \(I\), the authors rely on an interesting decomposition formula that is shown in Section 2, namely that \(I^n = (f_1, \dots , f_{\ell-1})I^{n-1}+(f_{\ell}, f_{\ell+1})^n\) for large \(n\), where \(f_i\) are general elements. This decomposition is shown to hold in a more general setting. In Section 4, certain classes of rings and ideals are shown to satisfy the assumptions of the main theorem, and thus the formula for the core is valid for these rings and ideals. One such instance yields a generalization of a result of Hyry and Smith to ideals generated by forms of the same degree that are not necessarily zero-dimensional or even equimultiple. The paper ends with a collection of concrete examples showing that many of the hypotheses of the earlier theorems are necessary.