It is well-known that for a large class of local rings of positive
characteristic, including complete intersection rings, the Frobenius
endomorphism can be used as a test for finite projective dimension. In this
paper, we exploit this property to study the structure of such rings. One of
our results states that the Picard group of the punctured spectrum of such a
ring R cannot have p-torsion. When R is a local complete intersection,
this recovers (with a purely local algebra proof) an analogous statement for
complete intersections in projective spaces first given in SGA and also a
special case of a conjecture by Gabber. Our method also leads to many simply
constructed examples where rigidity for the Frobenius endomorphism does not
hold, even when the rings are Gorenstein with isolated singularity. This is in
stark contrast to the situation for complete intersection rings. Also, a
related length criterion for modules of finite length and finite projective
dimension is discussed towards the end.Comment: Minor changes in Example 2.2 and Theorem 2.9. Conjecture 1.2 was
added
