Characteristic-free test ideals

Abstract

Tight closure test ideals have been central to the classification of singularities in rings of characteristic $p>0$, and via reduction to characteristic $p$, in equal characteristic zero as well. A summary of their properties and applications can be found in "A survey of test ideals" by Karl Schwede and Kevin Tucker. In this paper, we extend the notion of a test ideal to arbitrary closure operations, particularly those coming from big Cohen-Macaulay modules and algebras, and prove that it shares key properties of tight closure test ideals. Our main results show how these test ideals can be used to give a characteristic-free classification of singularities, including a few specific results on the mixed characteristic case. We also compute examples of these test ideals.

30 pages, minor revisions, to appear in Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. B