A note on the rigid core of affine surfaces

Abstract

During recent decades, $$\mathbb {G}_a$$-actions, especially certain invariants of $$\mathbb {G}_a$$-actions, have been important tools in the study of affine varieties. The $$\mathbb {G}_a$$-actions are usually studied through locally nilpotent derivations in characteristic zero and exponential maps (see Definition 1.1) in arbitrary characteristic. The “Makar-Limanov invariant” of locally nilpotent derivations played a pivotal role in solving the linearization conjecture in the 1990s, while invariants of exponential maps were central to N. Gupta’s resolution of the Zariski cancellation problem in positive characteristic. In the study of locally nilpotent derivations on commutative algebras containing $$\mathbb {Q}$$, Freudenburg and Moser-Jauslin (Mich Math J 62:227–258, (2013), Theorem 6.1) have introduced a new invariant called “rigid core” and used it to formulate an alternative version of Mason’s theorem and to prove a well-known analogue of Fermat’s last theorem for rational functions (Freudenburg and Moser-Jauslin (2013), Corollary 6.1). In this note, we consider the concept of the rigid core in the framework of exponential maps on commutative algebras over an algebraically closed field k of arbitrary characteristic. We observe that for any factorial k-domain B with $${\text {tr.deg}}_k(B)=2$$, the concept of rigid core coincides with the Makar-Limanov invariant. We also show that over any affine two-dimensional normal k-domain B, its rigid core is a stable invariant.