In 2012, Ananthnarayan, Avramov and Moore give a new construction of Gorenstein rings from two Gorenstein local rings, called their connected sum. Given a Gorenstein ring, one would like to know whether it decomposes as a connected sum and if so, wha
t are its components. We answer these questions in the Artinian case and investigate conditions on the ring which force it to be indecomposable as a connected sum. We further give a characterization for Gorenstein Artin local rings to be decomposable as connected sums, and as a consequence, obtain results about its Poincare series and minimal number of generators of its defining ideal. Finally, in the graded case, we show that the indecomposable components appearing in the connected sum decomposition are unique up to isomorphism.
We study a notion called $n$-standardness (defined by M. E. Rossi and extended in this paper) of ideals primary to the maximal ideal in a Cohen-Macaulay local ring and some of its consequences. We further study conditions under which the maximal idea
l is three-standard, first proving results when the residue field has prime characteristic and then using the method of reduction to prime characteristic to extend the results to the equicharacteristic zero case. As an application, we extend a result due to T. Puthenpurakal and show that a certain length associated to a minimal reduction of the maximal ideal does not depend on the minimal reduction chosen.
A new construction of rings is introduced, studied, and applied. Given surjective homomorphisms $Rto Tgets S$ of local rings, and ideals in $R$ and $S$ that are isomorphic to some $T$-module $V$, the emph{connected sum} $R#_TS$ is defined to be the l
ocal ring obtained by factoring out the diagonal image of $V$ in the fiber product $Rtimes_TS$. When $T$ is Cohen-Macaulay of dimension $d$ and $V$ is a canonical module of $T$, it is proved that if $R$ and $S$ are Gorenstein of dimension $d$, then so is $R#_TS$. This result is used to study how closely an artinian ring can be approximated by Gorenstein rings mapping onto it. It is proved that when $T$ is a field the cohomology algebra $Ext^*_{R#_kS}(k,k)$ is an amalgam of the algebras $Ext^*_{R}(k,k)$ and $Ext^*_{S}(k,k)$ over isomorphic polynomial subalgebras generated by one element of degree 2. This is used to show that when $T$ is regular, the ring $R#_TS$ almost never is complete intersection.
