Lyubeznik numbers of monomial ideals

Abstract

We study Bass numbers of local cohomology modules supported on squarefree monomial ideals paying special attention to Lyubeznik numbers. We build a dictionary between local cohomology modules and minimal free resolutions that allow us to interpret Lyubeznik numbers as the obstruction to the acyclicity of the linear strands of the Alexander dual ideals. The methods we develop also help us to give a bound for the injective dimension of the local cohomology modules in terms of the dimension of the small support.