Abstract. Let G be a graph and let I := I(G) be its edge ideal. In this paper, we provide an upper bound of n from which depth R/I (G) n is stationary, and compute this limit explicitly. This bound is always achieved if G has no cycles of length 4 and every its connected component is either a tree or a unicyclic graph.
IntroductionLet R = K[x 1 , . . . , x r ] be a polynomial ring over a field K and I a homogeneous ideal in R. Brodmann [2] showed that depth R/I n is a constant for sufficiently large n. Moreover limwhere ℓ(I) is the analytic spread of I. It was shown in [6, Proposition 3.3] that this is an equality when the associated graded ring of I is Cohen-Macaulay. We call the smallest number n 0 such that depth R/I n = depth R/I n 0 for all n n 0 , the index of depth stability of I, and denote this number by dstab(I). It is of natural interest to find a bound for dstab(I). As until now we only know effective bounds of dstab(I) for few special classes of ideals I, such as complete intersection ideals (see [5]), square-free Veronese ideals (see [8]), polymatroidal ideals (see [10]). In this paper we will study this problem for edge ideals.From now on, every graph G is assumed to be simple (i.e., a finite, undirected, loopless and without multiple edges) without isolated vertices on the vertex set V (G) = [r] := {1, . . . , r} and the edge set E(G) unless otherwise indicated. We associate to G the quadratic squarefree monomial idealwhich is called the edge ideal of G.If I is a polymatroidal ideal in R, Herzog and Qureshi proved that dstab(I) < dim R and they asked whether dstab(I) < dim R for all Stanley-Reisner ideals I in R (see [10]). For a graph G, if every its connected component is nonbipartite, then we can see that dstab(I(G)) < dim R from [4]. In general, there is not an absolute bound of dstab(I(G)) even in the case G is a tree (see [20]). In this paper we will establish a bound of dstab(I(G)) for any graph G. In particular, dstab(I(G)) < dim R.1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. 13D45, 05C90, 05E40, 05E45.