Core of ideals in integral domains (Q891466)

This paper gives many important contributions to develop explicit formulas for the reduction and the core of an ideal in various classes of integral domains, which are not necessarily Noetherian, such as valuation domains, Prüfer domains and pseudo-valuation domains. The tecniques used comes from the realm of multiplicative ideal theory. Let \(R\) be an integral domain and \(I,J\) ideals of \(R\). We say that \(J\) is a reduction of \(I\) if \(J\subseteq I\) and \(JI^{n}=I^{n+1}\), for some \(n\in\mathbb N\). The core of \(I\), introduced by Sally (see [\textit{D. Rees} and \textit{J. D. Sally}, Mich. Math. J. 35, No. 2, 241--254 (1988; Zbl 0666.13004)]) denoted by \(\text{core}(I)\), is defined as the intersection of all reductions of \(I\). The notion of reduction of ideals was introduced by \textit{D. G. Northcott} and \textit{D. Rees} in [Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. 50, 145--158 (1954; Zbl 0057.02601)], in the context of Noetherian rings. The present article investigates this notion in a general integral domain, in the spirit of the study started by \textit{J. H. Hays} in [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 177, 51--63 (1973; Zbl 0266.13001)]. The paper consists of two sections. In the first section explicit formulas for the core of nonzero ideals in valuation and pseudo-valuation domains and for the core of powers of prime ideals in Prüfer domains are established. More specifically, Theorem 2.3 determines the core of a non-invertible ideal of a valuation domain; the authors immediately remark at the beginning of the section that an invertible ideal of an integral domain does not admit proper reductions, so its core is equal to the ideal itself (Lemma 2.1). The same result does not hold globally for a Prüfer domain (Example 2.5), so the following Theorem 2.6 determines the core of powers of prime ideals in Prüfer domains. The last Theorem 2.11 of this section gives some results for the core of strongly stable ideals in a general integral domain. The second section is about minimal reductions. An ideal which has no reduction other than itself is called a basic ideal (e.g., an invertible or idempotent ideal, Lemma 2.1). A reduction of an ideal \(I\) is called minimal if it does not properly contains a reduction of \(I\). By the results of Northcott and Rees, the authors note that for an ideal \(I\) of a Noetherian local ring with infinite residue field, \(\text{core}(I)\) is a reduction of \(I\) if and only if \(I\) is basic. For a non-zero ideal \(I\) of a Prüfer domain, \(I\) has a minimal reduction if and only if \(I\) is basic (Theorem 3.3). The last results are in the realm of pseudo-valuation domains: it is proved that for such domains, contrary to the case of Prüfer domains, there are ideals with proper minimal reductions. Proposition 3.5 investigates the core of ideals in pseudo-valuation domains. Theorem 3.7 characterizes ideals in a pseudo-valuation domain which admit proper minimal reductions and also describes these minimal reductions. The paper contains many examples which illustrate the different situations that may occur.