Glicci simplicial complexes (Q932295)

The main purpose of this paper is to study liaison-theoretic problems and methods in the context of combinatorics, and in particular of simplicial complexes. One of the main open problems in liaison theory is whether every homogeneous Cohen-Macaulay ideal is in the Gorenstein liaison class of a complete intersection (i.e. is \textit{glicci}). Several classes of ideals are known to have this property, especially determinantal ideals of different sorts (due to several authors). Nagel and the reviewer also showed that it always holds ``up to deformation.'' The authors give an affirmative answer when the ideal is a Stanley-Reisner ideal defined by a simplicial complex that is weakly vertex-decomposiable. This important class of ideals includes matroid, shifted and Gorenstein complexes. The authors actually show a slightly stronger property, namely that of being \textit{squarefree glicci}. (This means that in even steps the intermediate ideals are squarefree monomial ideals.) The underlying construction that makes this all work is the notion of \textit{basic double G-linkage}. The authors also prove a special case of a conjecture of Stanley, which states that a Cohen-Macaulay simpicial complex is partitionable. In the last section, the authors give some very nice examples, and pose some problems about the relation of the characteristic of the base field to the question of glicciness of monomial ideals.