Rees algebras of finitely generated torsion -free modules over a two-dimensional regular local ring

Abstract

Let (R,m) be a two-dimensional regular local ring and let A be a finitely generated torsion-free R-module. If A is a complete module, then Katz and Kodiyalam show A satisfies five conditions, one of these being that the Rees algebra A of A is Cohen-Macaulay. They ask whether these five conditions are equivalent without assuming A to be complete. We exhibit an example to show that A/IA may be Cohen-Macaulay while A fails to be Cohen-Macaulay, and investigate other implications among these five properties in the case where A is not complete. We prove in general that the depth of A is greater than or equal to the depth of A/IA, and that if a module has reduction number at most one, then a direct summand also has reduction number at most one. We present an example where A is a direct sum of two submodules each of which has reduction number at most one while A has reduction number at least two. In the last section of this paper, we present two sufficient conditions for modules obtained by adjoining one element to the submodule to be complete.