Colon structure of associated primes of monomial ideals

Abstract

We find an explicit expression of the associated primes of monomial ideals as a colon by an element $v$, using the unique irredundant irreducible decomposition whose irreducible components are monomial ideals (Theorem 3.1). An algorithm to compute $v$ is given using Macaulay2 (Section 7). For squarefree monomial ideals the problem is related to the combinatorics of the underlying clutter or graph (Proposition 4.3). For ideals of Borel type the monomial $f$ takes a simpler form (Proposition 5.2). The authors classify when $f$ is unique (Proposition 6.2).