This paper is a much expanded version of two talks given in Ann Arbor in May of 2012 during the computational workshop on F-singularities. We survey some of the theory and results concerning the Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity and F-signature of positive characteristic local rings.Dedicated to David Eisenbud, on the occasion of his 65th birthday.
IntroductionThroughout this paper (R, m, k) will denote a Noetherian local ring of prime characteristic p with maximal ideal m and residue field k. We let e be a varying non-negative integer, and let q = p e . By I [q] we denote the ideal generated by x q , x ∈ I. If M is a finite R-module, M/I [q] M has finite length. We will use λ(−) to denote the length of an R-module. We assume knowledge of basic ideas in commutative algebra, including the usual Hilbert-Samuel multiplicity, Cohen-Macaulay, regular, and Gorenstein rings. The basic question this paper studies is how λ(M/I [q] M) behaves as a function on q, and how understanding this behavior leads to better understanding of the singularities of the ring R. In a seminal paper which appeared in 1969, [Ku1], Ernst Kunz introduced the study of this function as a way to measure how close the ring R is to being regular.The Frobenius homomorphism is the map F : R −→ R given by F (r) = r p . We say that R is F-finite if R is a finitely generated module over itself via the Frobenius homomorphism. It Date: September 2, 2014. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 13-02, 13A35, 13C99, 13H15. 1 2 CRAIG HUNEKE is not difficult to prove that if (R, m, k) is a complete local Noetherian ring of characteristic p, or an affine ring over a field k of characteristic p, then R is F-finite if and only if [k 1/p : k]is finite. When R is reduced we can identify the Frobenius map with the inclusion of R into R 1/p , the ring of pth roots of elements of R. If M is an R-module, we will usually write M 1/q to denote what is more commonly denoted F e * (M), where q = p e , the module which is the same as M as abelian groups, but whose R-module structure is coming from restriction of scalars via e-iterates of the Frobenius map. This is an exact functor on the category of R-modules. Notice that F e * (R) can be naturally identified with R 1/q . If the residue field k of R is perfect then the lengths of the R-modules R 1/q /IR 1/q and R/I [q] are the same. If k is not perfect, but R is F-finite, then we can adjust by [k 1/q : k]. We define α(R) := log p ([k 1/p : k]), so that we can write [k 1/q : k] = q α(R) . With this notation,More broadly, the two numbers we will study, namely the Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity and the F-signature, are characteristic p invariants which give information about the singularities of R, and lead to many interesting issues concerning how to use characteristic p methods to study singularities. There are four basic facts about characteristic p which make things work.Those facts are first that (r + s) p = r p + s p for elements in a ring of characteristic p (i.e., the Frobenius is an endomorphism); second, that the map from R −...