Stanley depth and simplicial spanning trees

Abstract

We show that for proving the Stanley conjecture, it is sufficient to consider a very special class of monomial ideals. These ideals (or rather their lcm lattices) are in bijection with the simplicial spanning trees of skeletons of a simplex. We apply this result to verify the Stanley conjecture for quotients of monomial ideals with up to six generators. For seven generators we obtain a partial result.

29 pages; some proofs clarified and many small corrections. To appear in J. Alg. Comb