The Frobenius Complexity of a Local Ring of Prime Characteristic

Abstract

We introduce a new invariant for local rings of prime characteristic, called Frobenius complexity, that measures the abundance of Frobenius actions on the injective hull of the residue field of a local ring. We present an important case where the Frobenius complexity is finite, and prove that complete, normal rings of dimension two or less have Frobenius complexity less than or equal to zero. Moreover, we compute the Frobenius complexity for the determinantal ring obtained by modding out the $2 \times 2$ minors of a $2 \times 3$ matrix of indeterminates, showing that this number can be positive, irrational and depends upon the characteristic. We also settle a conjecture of Katzman, Schwede, Singh and Zhang on the infinite generation of the ring of Frobenius operators of a local normal complete $\mathbb{Q}$-Gorenstein ring.