Embedded associated primes of powers of square-free monomial ideals

An ideal I in a Noetherian ring R is normally torsion-free if Ass(R/I^t)=Ass(R/I) for all t≥1. We develop a technique to inductively study normally torsion-free square-free monomial ideals. In particular, we show that if a square-free monomial ideal I is minimally not normally torsion-free then the least power t such that I^t has embedded primes is bigger than β₁, where β₁ is the monomial grade of I, which is equal to the matching number of the hypergraph H(I) associated to I. If, in addition, I fails to have the packing property, then embedded primes of I^t do occur when t=β₁+1. As an application, we investigate how these results relate to a conjecture of Conforti and Cornuéjols.