Abstract. In this paper, we prove several results on the finiteness of local cohomology of polynomial and formal power series rings. In particular, we give a partial affirmative answer for a question of L. Núñez-Betancourt in [J. Algebra 399 (2014), 770-781].
IntroductionThe motivation of this paper is the following conjecture of G. Lyubeznik: If R is a regular ring, then each local cohomology module H i I (R) has finitely many associated prime ideals. The Lyubeznik conjecture has affirmative answers in several cases: for regular rings of prime characteristic (cf. [7,9]); for regular local and affine rings of characteristic zero (cf. [8]); for unramified regular local rings of mixed characteristic (cf. [11,13]) and for smooth Z-algebras (cf. [2]). The method of the proof of these results is considering the module structure of local cohomology over non-commutative rings, D-modules (resp. F -modules). The finiteness of these module structures (for example, finite length) yields the finiteness of Ass S H i I (R). Motivated by the above finiteness results, M. Hochster raised the following related question (cf. [14, Question 1.1]): Question 1. Let (R, m, k) be a local ring and S a flat extension of R with regular closed fiber. Then is Ass S H 0 mS (H i I (S)) = V (mS) ∩ Ass S H i I (S) finite for every ideal I ⊂ S and for every integer i ≥ 0? Suppose S is a flat extension of R with regular fibers. It is worth to note that if Question 1 has an affirmative answer, then the finiteness conditions of Ass S H i I (S) and Ass R H i I (S) are equivalent. In [14], L. Núñez-Betancourt gave a positive answer for Question 1 when S is either R[x 1 , ..., x n ] or R[[x 1 , ..., x n ]] and dim R/(I ∩ R) ≤ 1. In that paper, he introduced the notion of Σ-finite D-modules. It should be noted that Σ-finite D-modules maybe not have finite length but they have finitely many associated primes. Núñez-Betancourt asked the following question (cf. [14, Question 5.1] ]]. In Section 3 we modify the definition of Σ-finite D-modules for rings that not necessarily local rings. We prove that H j J (S) is Σ-finite for every ideal J ⊆ S satisfying dim R/(J ∩ R) = 0 (cf. Proposition 3.7). Applying this result we give a positive answer for Question 2 when dim R/(J ∩ R) ≤ 1 (cf. Theorem 3.8). Moreover, a finiteness result of associated primes of local cohomology is given (cf. Corollary 3.9).In Section 4 we consider the following problem.Question 3. Suppose that dim R = 1 and S is either The next interesting case of Lyubeznik's conjecture is seem to be the case S = R[x 1 , ..., x n ] with R is a Dedekind domain (containing the field of rational numbers). This is a special case of Question 3. In this section we will give a partial affirmative answer of Question 3 in the case R contains a field of positive characteristic (cf. Proposition 4.4). It should be noted that H. Dao and the author showed that local cohomology of Stanley-Reisner rings over a field of positive characteristic have only finitely many associated primes, see [4] for a more general result...