Maximal Cohen-Macaulay complexes and their uses: A partial survey

Abstract

This work introduces a notion of complexes of maximal depth, and maximal Cohen-Macaulay complexes, over a commutative noetherian local ring. The existence of such complexes is closely tied to the Hochster's ``homological conjectures", most of which were recently settled by Andr\'e. Various constructions of maximal Cohen-Macaulay complexes are described, and their existence is applied to give new proofs of some of the homological conjectures, and also of certain results in birational geometry.