Mesoprimary decomposition of binomial submodules

Abstract

Recent results of Kahle and Miller give a method of constructing primary decompositions of binomial ideals by first constructing “mesoprimary decompositions” determined by their underlying monoid congruences. Mesoprimary decompositions are highly combinatorial in nature, and are designed to parallel standard primary decomposition over Noetherean rings. In this paper, we generalize mesoprimary decomposition from binomial ideals to “binomial submodules” of certain graded modules over a monoid algebra, analogous to the way primary decomposition of ideals over a Noetherean ring R generalizes to R-modules. The result is a combinatorial method of constructing primary decompositions that, when restricting to the special case of binomial ideals, coincides with the method introduced by Kahle and Miller.