Tight Closure
by ayushkhaitan3437
This is a small introduction on tight closure. This is an active field of research in commutative algebra, and this is essentially a survey article. This article will closely follow the paper “An introduction to tight closure” by Karen Smith.
Definition: Let be a Noetherian domain of prime characteristic
(not that in general,
need not be prime). Let
be an ideal with generators
Then an element
is defined to be in the tight closure
if
such that
.
What does this condition even mean? Let the ring under consideration be , and let the ideal
be
. Does the tight closure
contain
? For example,
. Then is it true that
? Yes! Because remember that the ring has characteristic
. Hence all the other terms in the binomial expansion are
. In general,
. It is easy to see why. What is an example of an element outside of
that belongs to
? Clearly,
? Why? Why can we not have a value for
such that
? For example,
. However, the value for
should remain the same for all prime powers
. Clearly, there is no such
.
Is an ideal? Yes. This is part is quite clear.
Properties of tight closure:
1. If is regular, then all ideals of
are tightly closed. In fact, one of the most important uses of tight closure is to compensate for the fact that the ring under consideration may not be regular.
2. If is an integral extension, then
for all ideals
. What does this condition mean? You’re multiplying
with an ideal outside of
. It might create elements in
that are outside of
, and even outside of
. The former is possible, but the latter is not.
3. If is local, with system of parameters
, then
. This means that we start building an ideal with the element
, and then every subsequent element that we add is present in the closure of the pre-existing ideal. Hence, it is like we’re building an ideal up from
to
.
4. If denotes the minimal number of generators of
, then
. Here
denotes the integral closure of
. Note that the number of generators of an ideal is generally not well defined. For instance the ideal
can also be written as
. However, the minimal number of generators is well-defined, as we’re talking about a Noetherian ring. Hence, every ideal has a finite number of generators. Note that
is easy to see. For instance, let
in
. Then
implies that
. Hence,
. This implies that
is integral over
, and hence
. What about
?
5. If is any ring map,
. Here
is actually
. This property is labelled as “persistence” in the paper. I suppose what this means is that it is good to persist (find the closure *after* you find the image) rather than throw up your hands at the beginning (finding the closure right at the beginning).
But I’m probably just putting words into Karen’s mouth. What do I know.
It seems to me that a tight closure is a “tighter” form of closure; tighter than integral closure for instance. And for a lot of analytic requirements, it is just the right size; integral closure would be too big.