We study arithmetic properties of tangent cones associated to affine monomial curves, using the concept of gluing. In particular we characterize the Cohen-Macaulay and Gorenstein properties of tangent cones of some families of monomial curves obtained by gluing. Moreover, we provide new families of monomial curves with non-decreasing Hilbert functions.
introductionA monomial curve C in the affine space A d k over a field k consists on the set of points defined parametrically by X 1 = t m1 , . . . , X d = t m d , for some positive integers m 1 < · · · < m d . In order to be sure that different parameterizations give rise to different monomial curves, we may assume that gcd(m 1 , . . . , m d ) = 1.In fact, it is known that the set C is an affine variety whose coordinate ring issee for instance E. Reyes, R. H. Villarreal and L. Zárate [17]. The set S = {r 1 m 1 + · · · + r d m d ; r i ≥ 0} is a subset of the non-negative integers N ∪ {0} which is closed under addition, and the condition gcd(m 1 , . . . , m d ) = 1 is equivalent to the property # N \ S < ∞. In other words, S =< m 1 , . . . , m d > is a numerical semigroup minimally generated by the unique minimal system of generators {m 1 , . . . , m d }. The coordinate ring R is called the numerical semigroup ring associated to S and it is denoted by k[S]. Since we are interested in the arithmetical properties at the origin, which is the only singular point of the curve C, we will consider the ring R = k[[t m1 , . . . , t m d ]] = k[[S]]. Note that R is a complete one-dimensional local domain with maximal ideal m = (t m1 , . . . , t m d ).We also consider the tangent cone associated to k[[S]]; that is the graded ring G(S) := n≥0 m n /m n+1 .