The reduction number of canonical ideals

Abstract

In this article, we introduce an invariant of Cohen-Macaulay local rings in terms of the reduction number of canonical ideals. The invariant can be defined in arbitrary Cohen-Macaulay rings and it measures how close to being Gorenstein. First, we clarify the relation between almost Gorenstein rings and nearly Gorenstein rings by using the invariant in dimension one. We next characterize the idealization of trace ideals over Gorenstein rings in terms of the invariant. It provides better prospects for a result on the almost Gorenstein property of idealization.