Semistar invertibility on integral domains

Abstract

After the introduction in 1994, by Okabe and Matsuda, of the notion of semistar operation, many authors have investigated different aspects of this general and powerful concept. A natural development of the recent work in this area leads to investigate the concept of invertibility in the semistar setting. In this paper, we will show the existence of a ``theoretical obstruction'' for extending many results, proved for star-invertibility, to the semistar case. For this reason, we will introduce two distinct notions of invertibility in the semistar setting (called $\star$--invertibility and quasi--$\star$--invertibility), we will discuss the motivations of these ``two levels'' of invertibility and we will extend, accordingly, many classical results proved for the $d$--, $v$--, $t$-- and $w$-- invertibility.