Gorenstein ring

In commutative algebra, a Gorenstein local ring is a commutative Noetherian local ring R with finite injective dimension as an R-module. There are many equivalent conditions, some of them listed below, often saying that a Gorenstein ring is self-dual in some sense. Gorenstein rings were introduced by Grothendieck in his 1961 seminar (published in ). The name comes from a duality property of singular plane curves studied by (who was fond of claiming that he did not understand the definition of a Gorenstein ring). The zero-dimensional case had been studied by . and publicized the concept of Gorenstein rings. Frobenius rings are noncommutative analogs of zero-dimensional Gorenstein rings. Gorenstein schemes are the geometric version of Gorenstein rings. For Noetherian local rings, there is the following chain of inclusions. A Gorenstein ring is a commutative Noetherian ring such that each localization at a prime ideal is a Gorenstein local ring, as defined below. A Gorenstein ring is in particular Cohen–Macaulay. One elementary characterization is: a Noetherian local ring R of dimension zero (equivalently, with R of finite length as an R-module) is Gorenstein if and only if HomR(k, R) has dimension 1 as a k-vector space, where k is the residue field of R. Equivalently, R has simple socle as an R-module. More generally, a Noetherian local ring R is Gorenstein if and only if there is a regular sequence a1,...,an in the maximal ideal of R such that the quotient ring R/( a1,...,an) is Gorenstein of dimension zero. For example, if R is a commutative graded algebra over a field k such that R has finite dimension as a k-vector space, R = k ⊕ R1 ⊕ ... ⊕ Rm, then R is Gorenstein if and only if it satisfies Poincaré duality, meaning that the top graded piece Rm has dimension 1 and the product Ra × Rm−a → Rm is a perfect pairing for every a.