Decomposing Gorenstein rings as connected sums

Abstract

In 2012, Ananthnarayan, Avramov and Moore give a new construction of Gorenstein rings from two Gorenstein local rings, called their connected sum. Given a Gorenstein ring, one would like to know whether it decomposes as a connected sum and if so, what are its components. We answer these questions in the Artinian case and investigate conditions on the ring which force it to be indecomposable as a connected sum. We further give a characterization for Gorenstein Artin local rings to be decomposable as connected sums, and as a consequence, obtain results about its Poincaré series and minimal number of generators of its defining ideal. Finally, we show that the indecomposable components appearing in the connected sum decomposition are unique up to isomorphism.