The Frobenius Structure of Local Cohomology

Given a local ring of positive prime characteristic there is a natural Frobenius action on its local cohomology modules with support at its maximal ideal. In this paper we study the local rings for which the local cohomology modules have only finitely many submodules invariant under the Frobenius action. In particular we prove that F-pure Gorenstein local rings as well as the face ring of a finite simplicial complex localized or completed at its homogeneous maximal ideal have this property. We also introduce the notion of an anti-nilpotent Frobenius action on an Artinian module over a local ring and use it to study those rings for which the lattice of submodules of the local cohomology that are invariant under Frobenius satisfies the Ascending Chain Condition.Comment: 35 pages. Section 3 was revised to emphasize Theorem 3.1, and some minor corrections/changes were performed. To appear in Algebra and Number Theor

Comparison of symbolic and ordinary powers of ideals

In this paper we generalize the theorem of Ein-Lazarsfeld-Smith (concerning the behavior of symbolic powers of prime ideals in regular rings finitely generated over a field of characteristic 0) to arbitrary regular rings containing a field. The basic theorem states that in such rings, if P is a prime ideal of height c, then for all n, the symbolic (cn)th power of P is contained in the nth power of P. Results are also given in the non-regular case: one must correct by a power of the Jacobian ideal in rings where the Jacobian ideal is defined