Abstract. We prove that the generic quantized coordinate ring Oq(G) is Auslander-regular, Cohen-Macaulay, and catenary for every connected semisimple Lie group G. This answers questions raised by Brown, Lenagan, and the first author. We also prove that under certain hypotheses concerning the existence of normal elements, a noetherian Hopf algebra is Auslander-Gorenstein and Cohen-Macaulay. This provides a new set of positive cases for a question of Brown and the first author.
IntroductionA guiding principle in the study of quantized coordinate rings has been that these algebras should enjoy noncommutative versions of the algebraic properties of their classical analogs. Moreover, based on the types of properties that have been established, one also conjectures that quantized coordinate rings should enjoy properties similar to the enveloping algebras of solvable Lie algebras. A property of the latter type is the catenary condition (namely, that all saturated chains of prime ideals between any two fixed primes should have the same length), which was established for a number of quantized coordinate rings by Lenagan and the first author [11]. However, among the quantized coordinate rings O q (G) for semisimple Lie groups G, catenarity has remained an open question except for the case G = SL n [11, Theorem 4.5]. The first goal of the present paper is to establish catenarity for (the C-form of) all the algebras O q (G).Following the principle indicated above, one expects the quantized coordinate rings of Lie groups to be homologically nice; in the noncommutative world, this means one looks for the Auslander-regular and Cohen-Macaulay conditions. In fact, Gabber's method for proving catenarity in enveloping algebras of solvable Lie algebras relies crucially on these properties, as does Lenagan and the first author's adaptation to quantum algebras. These conditions were verified for O q (SL n ) by Levasseur and Stafford, but remained open for arbitrary O q (G), although Brown and the first author were able to show that O q (G) has finite global dimension [6, Proposition 2.7]. Our second goal here is to establish the Auslander-regular and Cohen-Macaulay conditions for general O q (G).Let G be a connected semisimple Lie group over C. By O q (G), we mean the subalgebra of the Hopf dual of U q (g), where g is the Lie algebra of G, generated by the coordinate functions of the type 1 highest weight modules whose weights