Monomial Ideals and the Gorenstein Liaison Class of a Complete Intersection

In an earlier work, the authors described a mechanism for lifting monomial ideals to reduced unions of linear varieties. When the monomial ideal is Cohen–Macaulay (including Artinian), the corresponding union of linear varieties is arithmetically Cohen–Macaulay. The first main result of this paper is that if the monomial ideal is Artinian then the corresponding union is in the Gorenstein linkage class of a complete intersection (glicci). This technique has some interesting consequences. For instance, given any (d + 1)-times differentiable O-sequence H, there is a nondegenerate arithmetically Cohen–Macaulay reduced union of linear varieties with Hilbert function H which is glicci. In other words, any Hilbert function that occurs for arithmetically Cohen–Macaulay schemes in fact occurs among the glicci schemes. This is not true for licci schemes. Modifying our technique, the second main result is that any Cohen–Macaulay Borel-fixed monomial ideal is glicci. As a consequence, all arithmetically Cohen–Macaulay subschemes of projective space are glicci up to flat deformation.