A Lower Bound For Depths of Powers of Edge Ideals

Let $G$ be a graph and let $I$ be the edge ideal of $G$. Our main results in this article provide lower bounds for the depth of the first three powers of $I$ in terms of the diameter of $G$. More precisely, we show that \depth R/I^t \geq \left\lceil{\frac{d-4t+5}{3}} \right\rceil +p-1, where $d$ is the diameter of $G$, $p$ is the number of connected components of $G$ and $1 \leq t \leq 3$. For general powers of edge ideals we showComment: 21 pages, to appear in Journal of Algebraic Combinatoric

Embedded Associated Primes of Powers of Square-free Monomial Ideals

An ideal I in a Noetherian ring R is normally torsion-free if Ass(R/I^t)=Ass(R/I) for all natural numbers t. We develop a technique to inductively study normally torsion-free square-free monomial ideals. In particular, we show that if a square-free monomial ideal I is minimally not normally torsion-free then the least power t such that I^t has embedded primes is bigger than beta_1, where beta_1 is the monomial grade of I, which is equal to the matching number of the hypergraph H(I) associated to I. If in addition I fails to have the packing property, then embedded primes of I^t do occur when t=beta_1 +1. As an application, we investigate how these results relate to a conjecture of Conforti and Cornu\'ejols.Comment: 15 pages, changes have been made to the title, introduction, and background material, and an example has been added. To appear in JPA

Cohen-Macaulay admissible clutters

There is a one-to-one correspondence between square-free monomial ideals and clutters, which are also known as simple hypergraphs. It was conjectured that unmixed admissible clutters are Cohen-Macaulay. We prove the conjecture for uniform admissible clutters of heights 2 and 3. For admissible clutters of greater heights, we give a family of examples to show that the conjecture may fail. When the height is 4, we give an additional condition under which unmixed admissible clutters are Cohen-Macaulay.Comment: 13 pages, final version to appear in J. Comm. Al