Lattice Complements and the Subadditivity of Syzygies of Simplicial Forests

Abstract

We prove the subadditivity property for the maximal degrees of the syzygies of facet ideals simplicial forests. For such an ideal $I$, if the $i$-th Betti number is nonzero and $i=a+b$, we show that there are monomials in the lcm lattice of $I$ that are complements in part of the lattice, each supporting a nonvanishing $a$-th and $b$-th Betti numbers. The subadditivity formula follows from this observation.