Generalized local duality, canonical modules, and prescribed bound on projective dimension

Abstract

We present various approaches to J. Herzog's theory of generalized local cohomology and explore its main aspects, e.g., (non-)vanishing results as well as a general local duality theorem which extends, to a much broader class of rings, previous results by Herzog-Zamani and Suzuki. As an application, we establish a prescribed upper bound for the projective dimension of a module satisfying suitable cohomological conditions, and we derive some freeness criteria and questions of Auslander-Reiten type. Along the way, we prove a new characterization of Cohen-Macaulay modules which truly relies on generalized local cohomology, and in addition we introduce and study a generalization of the notion of canonical module.