Introduction. In this paper we make a detailed analysis of the Ꮽ-hypergeometric system (or GKZ system) associated with a monomial curve and integral, hence resonant, exponents. We describe all rational solutions and show in Theorem 1.10 that they are, in fact, Laurent polynomials. We also show that for any exponent there are at most two linearly independent Laurent solutions and that the upper bound is reached if and only if the curve is not arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay. We then construct, for all integral parameters, a basis of local solutions in terms of the roots of the generic univariate polynomial (0.5) associated with Ꮽ. We also determine in Theorem 3.7 the holonomic rank r(α) for all α ∈ Z 2 and show that d ≤ r(α) ≤ d +1, where d is the degree of the curve. Moreover, the value d +1 is attained only for those exponents α for which there are two linearly independent rational solutions, and, therefore, r(α) = d for all α if and only if the curve is arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay.In order to place these results in their appropriate context, we recall the definition of the Ꮽ-hypergeometric systems. These were introduced in a series of papers in the mid-1980s by the Gel fand school, particularly Gel fand, Kapranov, and Zelevinsky (see [7] and [9] and the references therein). Let Ꮽ = {ν 1 , . . . , ν r } ⊂ Z n+1 be a finite subset that spans the lattice Z n+1 . Suppose, moreover, that there exists a vector λ = (λ 0 , . . . , λ n ) ∈ Q n+1 such that λ, ν j = 1 for all j = 1, . . . , r, that is, the set Ꮽ lies in a rational hyperplane. Let Ꮽ also denote the (n + 1) × r matrix whose columns are the vectors ν j . Let ᏸ ⊂ Z r be the sublattice of elements v ∈ Z r such that Ꮽ · v = 0. Given α ∈ C n+1 , the Ꮽ-hypergeometric system with exponent (or parameter) α is The Ꮽ-hypergeometric system is holonomic (with regular singularities) and, consequently, the number of linearly independent solutions at a generic point is finite (see [7]). Let r(α) denote the holonomic rank of the system, that is, the dimension of the space of local solutions at a generic point in C r . If we drop the assumption that Ꮽ lies in a hyperplane, then the regular singularities property is lost, but, as Adolphson [2] has shown, the system remains holonomic. The singular locus is described by the zeroes of the principal Ꮽ-determinant (see [11]). We set R := C[ξ 1 , . . . , ξ r ]/Ᏽ Ꮽ , where Ᏽ Ꮽ is the toric idealWhen n = 1, we can assume without loss of generality that is then a rational solution with the same exponent. Similarly, one can show that the local residuesgive algebraic solutions with exponent (−a, −b) and, again, the total sum of residues is a rational solution.THE Ꮽ-HYPERGEOMETRIC SYSTEM OF A MONOMIAL CURVE
181In §1 we describe explicitly all rational solutions of the Ꮽ-hypergeometric system associated with a monomial curve. Since for Ꮽ as in (0.4) the principal Ꮽ-determinant factors into powers of x 0 , x d , and the discriminant (f ), we know a priori what the possible denominators of a rational solution may be. However, we show in T...