A criterion for determinantal presentations of numerical semigroup rings

Abstract

We study numerical semigroups whose defining ideals admit determinantal presentations by the $2\times2$ minors of a $2\times n$ matrix. A conjecture of Cuong, Kien, Matsuoka, and Truong relates such presentations to arithmetic progressions of pseudo-Frobenius numbers. We prove a numerical criterion for this determinantal presentation, reducing the conjecture to a problem on factorizations of maximal elements of an Apéry set in the numerical semigroup. As an application, we verify the conjecture in embedding dimension four under a unique factorization assumption on an Apéry set.