The behavior of the Hasse–Schmidt algebra under étale extension is used to show that the Hasse–Schmidt algebra of a smooth algebra of finite type over a field equals the ring of differential operators. These techniques show that the formation of Hasse–Schmidt derivations does not commute with localization, providing a counterexample to a question of Brown and Kuan; their conjecture is reformula...

This is an expanded version of my lecture at the Conference in Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry in Messina Italy in June 1999. The purpose of the talk was to give a brief introduction to the subject of tight closure, aimed at commutative algebraists who have not before studied this topic. The first part focused mainly on the definition and basic properties, with the second part focusi...

We formulate problems of tight closure theory in terms of projective bundles and subbundles. This provides a geometric interpretation of such problems and allows us to apply intersection theory to them. This yields new results concerning the tight closure of a primary ideal in a two-dimensional graded domain.

We introduce a new variant of tight closure associated to any fixed ideal a, which we call a-tight closure, and study various properties thereof. In our theory, the annihilator ideal τ(a) of all a-tight closure relations, which is a generalization of the test ideal in the usual tight closure theory, plays a particularly important role. We prove the correspondence of the ideal τ(a) and the multi...

Let R be a commutative Noetherian ring of prime characteristic p. Assume R (or, more generally, a finitely generated R-module N with SuppR(N) = Spec(R)) has finite F-representation type (abbreviated FFRT) by finitely generated R-modules. Then, for every c ∈ R◦, there is a uniform test exponent Q = p for c and for all R-modules. As a consequence, we show the existence of uniform test exponents o...

We study computational aspects of the tight closure of a homogeneous primary ideal in a two-dimensional normal standard-graded domain. We show how to use slope criteria for the sheaf of syzygies for generators of the ideal to compute its tight closure. In particular, our method gives an algorithm to compute the tight closure of three elements under the condition that we are able to compute the ...