The cone spanned by maximal Cohen-Macaulay modules and an application

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to define the notion of the Cohen- Macaulay cone of a Noetherian local domain R R and to present its applications to the theory of Hilbert-Kunz functions. It has been shown by the second author that with a mild condition on R R , the Grothendieck group G 0 ( R ) ¯ \overline {G_0(R)} of finitely generated R R -modules modulo numerical equivalence is a finitely generated torsion-free abelian group. The Cohen-Macaulay cone of R R is the cone in G 0 ( R ) ¯ R \overline {G_0(R)}_{\mathbb R} spanned by cycles represented by maximal Cohen-Macaulay modules. We study basic properties on the Cohen-Macaulay cone in this paper. As an application, various examples of Hilbert-Kunz functions in the polynomial type will be produced. Precisely, for any given integers ϵ i = 0 , ± 1 \epsilon _i = 0, \pm 1 ( d / 2 > i > d d/2 > i > d ), we shall construct a d d -dimensional Cohen-Macaulay local ring R R (of characteristic p p ) and a maximal primary ideal I I of R R such that the function ℓ R ( R / I [ p n ] ) \ell _R(R/I^{[p^n]}) is a polynomial in p n p^n of degree d d whose coefficient of ( p n ) i (p^n)^i is the product of ϵ i \epsilon _i and a positive rational number for d / 2 > i > d d/2 > i > d . The existence of such ring is proved by using Segre products to construct a Cohen-Macaulay ring such that the Chow group of the ring is of certain simplicity and that test modules exist for it.