Canonical trace ideal and residue for numerical semigroup rings

Abstract

For a numerical semigroup ring K[H] we study the trace of its canonical ideal. The colength of this ideal is called the residue of H. This invariant measures how far is H from being symmetric, i.e. how far is K[H] from being a Gorenstein ring. We remark that the canonical trace ideal contains the conductor ideal, and we study bounds for the residue. For 3-generated numerical semigroups we give explicit formulas for the canonical trace ideal and the residue of H. Thus, in this setting we can classify those whose residue is at most one (the nearly Gorenstein ones), and we show the eventual periodic behaviour of the residue in a shifted family.