Baire's category theorem and prime avoidance in complete local rings

Ideals and multiplicative ideal theory in commutative rings (13A15) Dimension theory, depth, related commutative rings (catenary, etc.) (13C15) Local rings and semilocal rings (13H99) Complete rings, completion (13J10) Complete metric spaces (54E50) Baire category, Baire spaces (54E52)

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Let A be a complete (commutative Noetherian) local ring (with identity) having maximal ideal \({\mathfrak m}\). Let (\({\mathfrak p}_ i)_{i=1,2,...}\) be a countable family of prime ideals of A. In Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. 72, 369-373 (1972; Zbl 0242.13018), \textit{L. Burch} showed that, if none of the \({\mathfrak p}_ i\) is equal to \({\mathfrak m}\), then there is an element of \({\mathfrak m}\) which is not contained in any \({\mathfrak p}_ i\). One of the purposes of the present note is to show that Baire's category theorem can be used to prove the above and other related countable prime avoidance results: it is shown that, for \(x\in A\) and \({\mathfrak a}\) an ideal of A, (i) if \({\mathfrak a}\subseteq\cup^{\infty}_{i=1}{\mathfrak p}_ i,\) then \({\mathfrak a}\subseteq {\mathfrak p}_ j\) for some \(j\geq 1\), and (ii) if \(Ax+{\mathfrak a}\varsubsetneq\cup^{\infty}_{i=1}{\mathfrak p}_ i,\) then there exists \(r\in {\mathfrak a}\) such that \(x+r\not\in\cup^{\infty}_{i=1}{\mathfrak p}_ i.\) The paper also shows that the countable prime avoidance property automatically holds in a (not necessarily complete) (commutative Noetherian) local ring which has uncountable residue field. In the second part of the paper, some of the above results are applied to a countably generated A-module M for which \(M\neq {\mathfrak m}M\) to show that at least some of the theory of grade and depth for finitely generated A- modules can be extended to such an M: it is shown that, if \({\mathfrak a}\) is a proper ideal of A, then all maximal M-sequences in \({\mathfrak a}\) have the same length, namely the least integer i such that \(Ext^ i_ A(A/{\mathfrak a},M)\neq 0.\) The paper concludes with an application to countably generated big Cohen-Macaulay A-modules.

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