Hereditary atomicity in integral domains

Abstract

If every subring of an integral domain is atomic, then we say that the latter is hereditarily atomic. In this paper, we study hereditarily atomic domains. First, we characterize when certain direct limits of Dedekind domains are Dedekind domains in terms of atomic overrings. Then we use this characterization to determine the fields that are hereditarily atomic. On the other hand, we investigate hereditary atomicity in the context of rings of polynomials and rings of Laurent polynomials, characterizing the fields and rings whose rings of polynomials and rings of Laurent polynomials, respectively, are hereditarily atomic. As a result, we obtain two classes of hereditarily atomic domains that cannot be embedded into any hereditarily atomic field. By contrast, we show that rings of power series are never hereditarily atomic. Finally, we make some progress on the still open question of whether every subring of a hereditarily atomic domain satisfies ACCP.