Ideals generated by prescribed powers of linear forms have attracted a great
deal of attention recently. In this paper we study properties that hold when
the linear forms are general, in a sense that we make precise. Analogously,
one could study so-called “general forms” of the same prescribed degrees.
One goal of this paper is to highlight how the differences between these
two settings are related to the weak Lefschetz property (WLP) and the
strong Lefschetz property (SLP). Our main focus is the case of powers of
general linear
forms in
variables. For four variables, our results allow the exponents to all be
different, and we determine when the WLP holds and when it does not in a
broad range of cases. For five variables, we solve this problem in the case
where all the exponents are equal (uniform powers), and in the case where
one is allowed to be greater than the others. For evenly many variables
()
we solve the case of uniform powers, and in particular we prove
half of a recent conjecture by Harbourne, Schenck and Seceleanu
by showing that for evenly many variables, an ideal generated by
-th powers of
general linear forms fails
the WLP if and only if
.
For uniform powers of an odd number of variables, we also give a result for seven variables, missing
only the case
.
Our approach in this paper is via the connection (thanks to Macaulay duality) to fat
point ideals, together with a reduction to a smaller projective space, and the use of
Cremona transformations.
Keywords
weak Lefschetz property, artinian algebra, powers of linear
forms, fat points