Unique decomposition of orders

Abstract

We establish a Fundamental Theorem of Orders (FTO), which allows us to express any order (in a number field) uniquely as an intersection of \textit{irreducible orders}. Along this decomposition, the index (in the ring of integers) distributes multiplicatively, and the conductor factors into pairwise co-prime ideals. We use it to show a more general version of Furtwangler criterion about the structure of conductors of orders over $\Z$, as this answers a wide variations of such questions. In a future work, we will also give applications to weighted enumeration of number fields.