Gap Sheaves and Vogel Cycles

Abstract

Throughout our work on the Lê cycles of an affine hypersurface singularity, our primary algebraic tool consisted of a method for taking the Jacobian ideal of a complex analytic function and decomposing it into pure-dimensional "pieces". These pieces were obtained by considering the relative polar varieties of Lê and Teissier as gap sheaves. A gap sheaf is a formal device which gives a scheme-theoretic meaning to the analytic closure of the difference of an initial scheme and an analytic set. We would like to extend our results on Lê cycles to functions on an arbitrary complex analytic space, and so we generalize this algebraic approach. We begin with an ordered set of generators for an ideal, and produce a collection of pure-dimensional analytic cycles, the Vogel cycles, which seem to contain a great deal of ``geometric'' data related to the original ideal. We prove a number of useful results, including some extremely general Lê-Iomdine-Vogel formulas; these formulas generalize the Lê Iomdine formulas that we used so profitably in previous work.